FMS 2020: Kioxia Improves Software-Enabled Flash Technology with QLC Flash and Weighted Fair Queueing

KIOXIA America, Inc. announced the addition of QLC support and weighted fair queueing (WFQ) to its Software-Enabled Flash technology. The addition of these features demonstrates firm’s commitment to developing barrier-breaking technology for cloud-scale storage.

The company will highlight Software-Enabled Flash at FMS technical session on November 11.

7 Reasons for Software-Enabled Flash Technology
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First announced at the 2020 Open Compute Summit in April, this Software-Enabled Flash technology removes the barriers associated with legacy hard drive-based technologies to deliver an new way to maximize the potential of flash. This technology changes the relationship between solid state storage and the host in cloud environments. With this technology, developers are freed from narrowly defined “drive” behavior, which presents challenges for applications requiring control over workload isolation, data placement, and QoS. Using the API specification, hyperscale flash storage developers realize the increased speed and capability of flash with the ease of software definability.

Software-Enabled Flash technology delivers a WFQ capability that allows the user to define and control latency live as applications are running – something that has not been possible with traditional drive-based solutions.

WFQ delivers queuing and scheduling features including:
• Host control to prioritize and manage die time and deliver latency management through the Software-Enabled Flash API
• Host can prioritize multiple workloads based on application and modify when needed

KIOXIA has also added QLC support to the open source software API, making Software-Enabled Flash technology able to support all popular NAND densities including SLC, MLC, TLC, and QLC.

“These new capabilities expand the functionality of the API, improve user control and deliver on our promise to improve flash efficiencies in hyperscale data centers,” noted Eric Ries, SVP, memory storage strategy division. “With the addition of QLC support and WFQ, KIOXIA continues to evolve the capability and functionality of our Software-Enabled Flash technology – making it one of the best new tools for developers to build on.”

Software-Enabled Flash hardware is compliant with PCIe standards, enabling a large ecosystem and accelerating open innovation across multiple products. The API specification is available on the KIOXIA GitHub, Inc.’s site.