SC19: Kioxia With PCIe 4.0 NVMe Enterprise SSDs Achieved PCI-SIG Compliance for PCIe 4.0 and UNH-IOL Certification

Kioxia America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), U.S.-based subsidiary of kioxia Corporation, announced that its lineup of PCIe 4.0 NVMe enterprise SSDs has achieved PCI-SIG compliance for PCIe 4.0 and University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) certification.

The CM6 Series passed interoperability tests at the August 2019 PCI-SIG Compliance Workshop – the first workshop to include official PCIe 4.0 spec tests. The company will be on hand at Supercomputing 2019 to showcase new levels of flash performance enabled by its CM6 Series SSDs. Demonstrations with nCorium and EchoStreams running a parallel file system workload can be seen at EchoStreams’ on the show floor of the Colorado Convention Center.

Publicly demonstrate PCIe 4.0 SSDs, the firm has established itself as a provider in developing PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs and continues to push the limits of flash storage performance. The CM6 Series brings planned performance improvements of 3x over its PCIe 3.0 predecessors and is 12x faster than SATA drives ⁽¹⁾. The company’s lineup of Gen4 PCIe SSDs also includes the CD6 Series, which is targeted to cloud and scale-out environments.

Key features:

Utilizes firm’s 96-layer BiCS flash 3D flash memory
PCIe 2×2 or 1×4 lane configuration options
Targeted transfer rates up to 6,900MB/s⁽¹⁾
Supports SFF-TA-1001 (also known as U.3) operation with Universal Backplanes for simplified customer use with SAS, SATA and NVMe SSDs

The company was at Microsoft Ignite to demonstrate the CM6 Series running in a Microsoft Azure HCI platform with Quanta Cloud Technologies, LLC – and enabling 2x performance gains over a PCIe 3.0 solution.

“We were able to show that our CM6 Series SSDs are capable of pushing SSD sequential read performance to over 55 gigabytes per second (GB/s) across eight drives – nearly 7GB/s per SSD – and we’re not done yet. KIOXIA will continue to push the performance envelope for our customers,” noted Alvaro Toledo, VP, SSD marketing and product planning, Kioxia America.

PCI-SIG hosts compliance workshops several times a year in various locations worldwide, giving members the opportunity to test and validate their products before entering the field. Compliance testing is completed vs. both PCI-SIG maintained systems and other manufacturers of PCI products. As a testing and certification lab for NVMe technology and software, the UNH-IOL provides conformance and interoperability testing across various OSs, drivers, and hardware platforms, as well as PCIe SSDs and PCIe-enabled servers.

“The SSD market is quickly moving to NVMe technology, and standards compliance is critical to ensure smooth adoption,” added Toledo.

⁽¹⁾ Performance estimates are preliminary and subject to change without notice

Read also:
FMS: Toshiba PCIe 4.0 NVMe 2.5-Inch CM6 Series SSDs for Enterprises Up to 30TB
Sequential read performance of over 6.4GB/s, and 1 or 3 drive writes per day endurance options
August 12, 2019 | Press Release