For OCP Summit 2022, Kioxia launched a new NVMe SSD. The Kioxia XD7P SSD. This is a PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD designed for hyper-scalers. The new NVMe SSDs are designed for next-generation servers that hyper-scalers are starting to deploy.
Kioxia XD7P Launched for OCP Summit 2022
The new SSDs are E1.S form factors. The E1.S form factor is becoming extremely popular in the hyper-scale segment. OCP also has the Open Compute Project Data Center NVMe SSD v2.0 specification to help align drive vendors with hyper-scale requirements. These new SSDs support that spec.
In terms of the drives themselves, the starting capacity is 1.92TB and there are also 3.84TB and 7.68TB configurations. The endurance spec is rated at 1 DWPD. In the hyper-scale market, usually, we do not see drive endurance ratings above 1 DWPD. We are also seeing a number of innovations in how SSDs are managed in hyper-scale markets that help reduce the need for over-provisioning and higher endurance ratings.
Kioxia is also using the E1.S EDSFF form factor in different sizes for different cooling requirements. If you want to learn more about EDSFF, you can see E1 and E3 EDSFF to Take Over from M.2 and 2.5 in SSDs.
The fact that these SSDs are all EDSFF indicates the market trend in OCP.
Final Words
Overall, these are drives we would expect to see mostly appeal to hyper-scalers. At the same time, we also see OCP having a heavy influence on overall server design. OCP has been breaking down many of the proprietary form factors and operations for things like NICs (with OCP NIC 3.0) and more. Hopefully,
we get to try some of these drives out as we get into our next-generation server testing with Sapphire Rapids, Genoa, and Ampere One servers in the near future. Kioxia says that while these are Gen4 SSDs, Gen5 SSDs are in development based on customer demand.
Could someone relay to Kioxia the need to work on their presentation color schemes? This time it’s light orange and some yellow on a medium orange backing (bolding the black text at least could’ve helped that part of it I suppose), last time I’d seen one of their decks it was one shade of blue on another with some green thrown in for good measure, just rough.
I love their products, and look forward to performance testing/tuning at work every time we get anything from them in. But these marketing folks really need a graphical design 101 course!