Flash Memory Summit: Cnex Labs Partnering with Microsoft

At Flash Memory Summit 2017, CNEX Labs, Inc., a private semiconductor company providing solid-state storage controllers and software for cloud, hyperscale, and enterprise data centers, announced an initiative in collaboration with Microsoft Corp.to standardize cloud-optimized Open-Channel SSD technology amidst growing industry support for the ground-breaking approach to non-volatile storage at hyper-scale.

“Microsoft is collaborating with CNEX to develop Open-Channel SSD technology, ensuring it meets the demanding requirements of a cloud-first world,” said Kushagra Vaid, GM, Microsoft Azure hardware infrastructure. “Together we’re excited to open this collaboration to industry partners with the aim of developing a robust ecosystem for this game-changing technology.“

“CNEX is proud to be working closely with Microsoft, Broadcom and other industry leaders to bring Open-Channel SSD technology to market, and we look forward to even wider industry collaboration as we produce an industry standard specification,” said Dr. Alan Armstrong, CEO and co-founder, CNEX Labs. “CNEX’s state-of-the-art PCIe SSD controllers are built from the ground up with native Open-Channel SSD support to achieve unprecedented performance with low and deterministic latencies, and we have made significant investments in host software – including to LightNVM, the Linux subsystem for Open-Channel SSDs – to provide a launch pad for the broad adoption of this break-through storage advancement.“

“Broadcom is excited to participate in the Open-Channel SSD initiative,” said Ed Redmond, SVP and GM of the compute and connectivity division, Broadcom Ltd. “With LightNVM host software, developed by CNEX, running on Broadcom’s NetXtreme S-Series high performance ARM cores, our customers can now provide IO determinism over NMVe-oF. This will enable more predictable QoS and application performance resulting in rapid adoption of Open-Channel SSD.“

Product announcements and demonstrations highlight
maturing Open-Channel SSD technology ecosystem, including: 

• Broadcom NetXtreme S-Series SOC with Open-Channel SSD support and NVMe over Fabrics connectivity
• OakGate Technology SSD test appliance featuring the company’s storage validation framework software, now with Open-Channel SSD test capability
• SerialTek BusExpert Micro II PCIe/NVMe protocol analyzer with Open-Channel SSD command decode support
• CNEX Labs Open-Channel SSD reference design and Linux LightNVM host software

Solid-state storage is experiencing growth in cloud infrastructure due to its advantages in throughput, latency, and power consumption. However, in large multi-tenant cloud environments with demanding, varied workloads, optimizing performance while also achieving low and predictable latencies is a challenge due to IO collisions and background processing performed by each SSD. Open-Channel SSDs expose the internal parallelism of SSDs and provide greater control of the underlying physical media by the host, enabling a more centralized, software-defined intelligence to manage IO scheduling and data placement to achieve more deterministic I/O performance.

The Open-Channel SSD standards initiative will be open to participation by member companies beginning in Q4 of 2017, with a specification release targeted in the first half of 2018.