Kioxia 2021 Predictions for SSDs

By Paul Rowan, VP SSD, Kioxia Europe GmbH

Kioxia Predictions for 2021

Decentralize to the low-latency edge: There is much interest in expanding decentralized computing and storage to the edge. This is growing the demand for low latency, high-performance flash-based storage. Traditional interfaces, such as SATA and SAS, will continue to be passed over for NVMe, an interface designed for flash-based SSD, something that complements our advancements in 3D BiCS flash memory. This can be seen in our latest devices featuring PCIe Gen4, delivering 2x the performance of PCIe Gen3 devices and being 12x faster than SATA SSDs. Per gigabyte price improvement will continue to see flash storage grow in prevalence throughout the storage stack.

Time for fabric: Selecting NVMe will also grow the adoption of NVMe-oF. This allows data center operators to disaggregate SSDs from compute nodes, sharing the available storage over today’s fast networks. Supporting the trend is KumoScale, Kioxia’s NVMe-oF software known for its shared storage efficiency while also achieving performance levels close to that of server-attached SSDs.

Density, interface, volume: Advancements in flash memory chip density will continue to trickle down into SSD storage. Our current enterprise products boast 30TB in a 2.5″ form factor and are based on our latest 96-layer 3D NAND. With the growing mix of demands on servers beyond storage, such as AI and ML GPU compute and the never-ending questing to speed up networking technology, connectors and form factors will be a core focus in 2021.

KIOXIA is a member of the SNIA SFF-TA-1008 technical working group looking at the Enterprise and Datacenter SSD Form Factor (EDSFF). This will deliver a common connector for storage, GPUs, and NICs to offer unprecedented system flexibility, higher bit density per rack, and improved chassis and cooling design. With the design limitation of 2.5″ storage behind us, the industry will be able to support higher power budgets (up to 40W) and deliver the signal integrity demanded by PCIe Gen5.0.