SC19: NSS2249 NVMe Storage Solution by Viking Enterprise Solutions

Viking Enterprise Solutions, a product division of Sanmina Corporation, announced the NSS2249 and has showcased this enterprise storage solution during SC19.

It is one of the first NVMe storage solutions of its kind, doubling throughput and bandwidth for enterprise applications that demand high level of performance such as storage for edge computing, high-frequency trading, caching, database transaction processing, tiered storage and supercomputing storage applications.

The design of NSS2249 includes the lAMD EPYC CPU technology, NVMe drives based on the PCIe 4.0 spec and is configurable to support up to 2 CPU server modules that provide storage system performance. The architecture takes advantage of 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes from EPYC’s CPU to directly connect 24 drives, driving down cost and latency.

The NSS2249 alleviates job pipeline congestion, a common limitation caused by I/O bottlenecks in many performance applications such as edge computing storage, analytics, ML, AI, OLTP transactional databases, high-frequency trading, as well as modeling, simulation and other HPC use cases and scientific research.

“NSS2249 is one of the first enterprise storage solutions available that brings together next gen AMD EPYC CPU and NVMe drives that support the new PCIe 4.0 spec, providing an underlying architecture capable of surpassing typical industry performance seen up until now,” said Tom Coughlin, founder and digital storage analyst, Coughlin Associates. “By capitalizing on the latest technology and developing such a robust offering, Viking Enterprise Solutions is an early mover that continues to offer solutions to the enterprise storage market.“

Advantages of NSS2249 include:

• Performance. Independent customer and partner testing has resulted in up to 80GB/s (reads), 60GB/s (writes) and three million IO/s in a single 2RU system.

• NVMe storage density and capacity. Provides between 41.6TB (1.6TB SSD) to 734TB (30.6TB SSD) of raw capacity in a 2U form factor. One unit houses 24 of the NVMe PCIe 4.0 drives and provides the flexibility to support up to 2 CPU server modules for a performance increase of up to 200%, compared to PCIe v3.0 NVMe drive-based platforms.

• Bandwidth. Each AMD chip supports 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes per CPU, providing high bandwidth without the complexity or added expense of additional components for switching infrastructure.

• Balanced system architecture for non-blocking performance. Provides 96 PCIe 4.0 lanes to the NVMe drives and 96 PCIe 4.0 lanes for network expansion, based on dual server configuration.

• HA and robust enterprise-grade platform. Dual-ported and hot-swappable NVMe drives and a redundant architecture.

• Cost effective platform at performance. New design does not require the additional switching infrastructure of previous solutions, reducing cost while providing high performance.

“The unmatched performance, capacity and density of this new system makes it a compelling platform to power data-driven workloads, not only for cloud service providers but also enterprises looking for the latest solutions for their high-performance data analysis stacks, AI and HPC use cases,” said Dan Liddle, VP, marketing, Viking. “Adding AMD CPU technology to our solutions puts them in the company of other high caliber leaders, enabling us to continuously innovate and provide the most advanced storage solutions to support our customer’s rapid growth and ongoing digital transformation.“

The NSS2249 is sampling and will be available in 1Q20.