Flash Storage Advances From Kioxia, WDC, HPE And Quantum

This article will look at several recent developments in NAND storage by Kioxia and Western Digital and applications for flash memory from HPE, including a collaboration with VAST Data and Quantum’s new Myriad software-defined all flash object storage.

Kioxia and Western Digital announced their next generation (BiCS 8) 3D flash memory has been shipped for sampling to some customers. The two companies say this latest generation product uses advanced scaling and wafer bonding technologies to achieve higher storage capacities at a lower cost. The company says that they increased storage capacity with both vertical and lateral scaling and that manufactured the CMOS logic wafer and the memory cell wafers separately and then bonded those wafers together to enhance the bit density and provide higher performance NAND. They call this process CMOS directly bonded to array (CBA).

The 218-layer 3D flash leverages 1Tb triple-level-cell (TLC) and quad-level-cell (QLC) with four planes and features lateral shrink technology to increase bit density by over 50 percent. Its NAND I/O provides data at over 3.2Gb/s, a 60 percent improvement over the previous generation. This is combined with a 20 percent write performance and read latency improvement.

In March Kioxia America announced its participation in the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Spaceborne Compute-2 (SBC-2) program. In this program, Kioxia SSDs will provide flash storage in HPE Edgeline and ProLiant servers in a test environment for conducting scientific experiments aboard the International Space Station (ISS). This is part of a greater mission to advance computing and reduce dependency on communications by providing local storage as space exploration expands. The photo below shows the SBC-2 HPE servers.

As part of SBC-2, Kioxia has provided SSDs such as their RM Series Value SAS and XG series NVME SSDs for the HPE servers.

HPE also recently announced block and file storage with its GreenLake program using VAST data software running on the company’s Alletra Storage MP hardware. VAST says that by leveraging VAST’s unique and innovative scale-out software architecture for the new HPE GreenLake for File Storage, enterprise customers can manage unstructured data with high performance at scale to deliver superior time to data insight.

The HPE GreenLake for File Storage uses VAST’s Disaggregated Share-Everything (DASE) architecture. The HPE data service allows enterprise to run their unstructured data workloads from one control plane. The HPE GreenLake for File Storage is available to order today.

Quantum announced its Myraid software-defined all-flash scale-out and object storage platform. According to the company, Myriad’s shared-nothing architecture designed for the latest flash technologies delivers consistent low-latency performance at any scale. It introduces inline data services such as deduplication and compression, snapshots and clones, and metadata tagging to accelerate AI/ML data processing. And it uses familiar and proven cloud technologies, like microservices and Kubernetes, to deliver cloud simplicity wherever deployed.

The software operates on standard high-volume flash storage servers so IT teams can quickly adopt the latest hardware and storage infrastructure for future needs. The image below shows features of Myriad software-defined storage.

Myriad is available now for early access customers and is planned for general availability in the third quarter of this year.

Kioxia and WDC announce higher capacity 3D flash. Kioxia works with HPE to bring SSDs to space and HPE partners with VAST Data for unstructured data workloads. Quantum introduced its Myriad software defined all flash scale-out and object storage.