Kioxia Production-Ready Availability of 9.5mm XD6 Series Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor E1.S Data Center Class Up to 3.84TB SSDs

Delivering on the promise of SSDs that address future enterprise infrastructure requirements, Kioxia America, Inc. announced production-ready availability of its 9.5mm XD6 Series Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E1.S data center class SSDs.

Introduced in late 2020, XD6 drives were the first ⁽¹⁾ EDSFF E1.S SSDs to address the specific requirements of hyperscale applications, including the performance, power and thermal requirements of the Open Compute Platform (OCP) NVMe Cloud SSD Specification. XD6 series also supports E1.S 15mm and 25mm form factor options,  to select the right balance of cooling through different E1.S heatsink options.

Representing an innovation in flash storage for servers in cloud and hyperscale data centers, the EDSFF E1.S SSDs are designed to optimize system density, efficiency and management. As defined by the EDSFF consortium and leveraging the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD Specification, the small form factor E1.S replaces the M.2 form factor and delivers greater density, performance, reliability, and thermal management. E1.S is also designed to be hot pluggable for increased serviceability, which is another benefit over M.2.

Utilizing the firm’s BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory, the read-intensive XD6 Series features 1 DWPD⁽²⁾ endurance, is compliant to NVMe 1.3c and PCIe 4.0 specifications, and is available in capacities⁽³⁾ of 1.92 and 3.84TB. An option for TCG-Opal 2.0 encryption is included.

EDSFF E1.S is targeted at large-scale deployments in hyperscale data centers, due to its ability to scale in terms of capacity, power, performance and thermals. Drives designed to the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD specification can be used in the new OCP Yosemite V3 platform developed by Facebook, Inc.

“Microsoft and the OCP Storage workgroup demonstrated how an open collaboration across the industry could align hyperscalers, system designers and SSD vendors around next-generation storage form factors,” said Jason Adrian, senior director, Azure platform architecture, Microsoft Corp. “The EDSFF E1.S form factor is the future of flash storage in hyperscale data centers, including Azure platforms. Solid state disks designed to the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD specification, such as the Kioxia XD6 Series, will power the next generation of EDSFF E1.S-based servers.”

“Advancements in hyperscale data centers require flash deployments to be more efficient and optimized,” said Maulik Sompura, director, product management, Kioxia America. “New specifications and form factors, such as EDSFF, have emerged and are poised to deliver substantial advantages over current form factors in terms of required capabilities. By delivering higher IO/s per terabyte, higher IO/s per watt, higher density per square inch – especially for 1U servers- and significantly better thermals, XD6 SSDs dramatically improve the total cost of ownership for our customers.”

The company is an active and contributing member to the industry development of EDSFF E1 and E3 solutions and is collaborating with server and storage system developers to unlock the power of flash memory, NVMe and PCIe technologies.

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^[1] Based on a survey of publicly available information as of November 3, 2020.
^[2] DWPD: Drive Write(s) Per Day. One full drive write per day means the drive can be written and re-written to full capacity once a day every day for five years, the stated product warranty period. Actual results may vary due to system configuration, usage and other factors.
^[3] Definition of capacity: Kioxia Corporation defines a 1MB as 1,000,000 bytes, 1GB)as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a 1TB as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer OS, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1Gb = 2^30 bits = 1,073,741,824 bits, 1GB = 2^30 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes and 1TB = 2^40 bytes = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes and therefore shows less storage capacity. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system, and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.