SANBlaze Shipping PCIe Gen4 NVMe SBExpress Test Systems

SANBlaze Technologies, Inc. begun shipping its PCIe Gen4 NVMe SBExpress test systems to its early adopter partners to perform early testing on their new NVMe Gen4 SSDs.

The SBExpress-RM4 PCI Gen4 NVMe SSDs test system provides customers with a 16-drive rackmount system that tests both single or dual port NVMe drives simultaneously. The system automatically detects single or dual path Gen4 drives and utilizes the PCIe lanes accordingly.

“PCIe Gen4 is the next performance benchmark for NVMe storage systems, and our NVMe customers have been eager to test their NVMe Gen4 devices at speed. SANBlaze is providing our Tier One customers with a chance to get a significant jump on their competition by allowing full speed testing of NVMe Gen4 drives before the server industry gets Gen4 PCIe into the mainstream,” said Vince Asbridge, president, SANBlaze.

“Due to the demand for Gen4 test platforms, we are offering our SBExpress-RM4 system to our ‘Early Adopter’ partners first,” he added. “There are still a few openings remaining in the program, which are reserved for customers who are currently producing Gen4 drives.“

Coupled with SANBlaze Version V8.0 software, the company offers automated NVMe Gen4 testing including power margining and measurement, performance testing, exception testing including PERST, hot plug, surprise and graceful removal, link training (Gen4,3,2, and 1) and low power state testing. Built in IOL tests as part of the Certified by SANBlaze test suite allow for pre-testing for UNH certification.

“The ability to automatically run NVMe conformance testing according to the IOL NVMe specification is a feature that our customers greatly appreciate,” said Mitul Patel, senior software and systems engineer. “Test engineers are provided with a variety of test scenarios that can be run against NVMe SSD drives, including I/O performance, NVMe conformance, automated Hot Plug/Hot Swap, and error injection, making their jobs a lot easier and testing a lot faster and less costly.“

The SBExpress-RM4 includes an industrial power supply for thermal chamber testing providing 25W to each device under test at 75C.

Software support for the NVMe protocol includes features including GUI, CLI and XML API support, NVMe-MI test scripts, and the ability to decode NVMe-MI response message status values. In addition, the software supports advanced features such as streams and multiple SQs per CQ.

The SANBlaze early adopter program for SBExpress PCIe Gen4 provides new features that customers who are designing Gen4 NVMe drives have asked for.