New Greenliant NVMe U.2 EnduroSLC Industrial Enterprise EX Series offers high performance and ultra high endurance

Greenliant is now sampling its NVMe U.2 EnduroSLC Industrial Enterprise EX Series solid state drives (SSDs) to customers that require ultra high endurance primary storage with sustainable low latency and high performance in extreme environments. 

Designed with Greenliant’s EnduroSLC Technology, NVMe U.2 Industrial Enterprise EX Series SSDs provide ultra robust data retention and ultra high system-level lifetime endurance of 30 drive writes per day (DWPD) for five years.

The NVMe U.2 EnduroSLC Industrial Enterprise SSDs with 1-bit-per-cell (SLC) NAND includes ultra high endurance that reaches 30 DWPD for five years; delivers high capacity offered from 800 GB to 1.92 TB; with high performance that reaches up to 2,600/1,900 MB/s read/write. 

It also offers on-chip adaptive RAID that improves SSD reliability; power interrupt data protection that helps prevent data corruption during power failures; industrial temperature that operates between -40 and +85 degrees celsius, and data security functionality that supports AES 256-bit encryption and crypto erase.

“For the highest levels of data integrity, Greenliant’s NVMe U.2 Industrial Enterprise SSDs implement on-chip adaptive RAID,” said Xuanhui Li, vice president of business development, Datacenter Products, Greenliant. “With Greenliant’s NVMe U.2 Industrial Enterprise SSDs, customers can achieve the efficiency and scalability required to meet the demands of write intensive applications in harsh environments.”

Greenliant is sampling its new G7200 Industrial Enterprise EX Series SSDs to customers now, and expects to start shipping in volume production by end of 2019. Greenliant also plans to ship its 3-bit-per-cell (3D TLC NAND) Enterprise PX Series SSDs in capacities from 960 GB to 3.84 TB in the first quarter of this year. 

Scale Computing debuts small HCI edge appliance for edge computing, IT infrastructure deployments

Scale Computing released its latest HC3 Edge appliance, which is powered by Intel technology, offers a low-cost edge solution that is built on a tiny form factor, making it ideal to deploy in small clusters where highly available computing was previously cost-prohibitive. The appliance also introduces HC3 Edge Fabric, which eliminates the need for a backplane network switch requirement, lowering the TCO and delivering simpler connectivity for edge networks.

The HE150 appliance is a small, all-flash, NVMe storage-based compute appliance that delivers simplicity, efficiency, and enterprise-ready virtualization associated with Scale Computing’s HC3 platform. 

Built specifically for sites that need highly available infrastructure, the HE150 can be deployed almost anywhere, without requiring a rack or server closet. Taking up only the space needed to stack three smartphones, it also includes disaster recovery, high availability clustering, rolling upgrades and integrated data protection.

The HE150 is based on the Intel NUC, offering excellent performance to handle a wide range of workloads. The cutting-edge construction and connectivity comes ready for industrial and IoT applications. The extremely small form factor consumes a small amount of power, offers ease of installation and an ability to rapidly add devices that scale up rapidly, along with the reliability needed for edge computing and IoT applications.

“The high-functionality, reliability and performance of HE150 represents a major breakthrough that will open up new markets for Scale Computing and its partners, including Infrastructure Technology Solutions,” said Joel Althoff, president at Infrastructure Technology Solutions. “With Scale Computing, HE150 opens up a new door to edge computing, delivering an affordable edge solution equipped with disaster recovery and resiliency, that is truly innovative in the marketplace.”

In addition to the new Scale Computing HE150 appliance, HC3 Edge software, which is available to large multi-site customers and partners, is also introducing general software support for Intel NUC based systems from other hardware suppliers. HC3 Edge software will be available soon for Lenovo’s new Smart Edge portfolio of fan-less, small form factor PCs. 

“With no IT staff on site, downtime is a constant concern at each of our locations. Downtime can cost us tens of thousands of dollars, and therefore is not an option for Jerry’s Foods,” explained Jeff Miller, director of IT at Jerry’s Foods. “I was blown away by the simplicity and functionality of Scale Computing’s edge solutions. It’s making a huge impact on my day-to-day IT operations. With the addition of the HE150, distributed enterprises now have the ability to scale up or down depending on their edge computing needs. It’s a win-win!”

“A growing number of distributed organizations require infrastructure at the edge of the network, specifically at sites where there are limited IT staff available. With edge computing on the rise, organizations are requiring solutions that can fit small footprint requirements with robust application performance, while still being affordable, efficient and simple to manage remotely,” said Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing. “This is why we created our newest HE150 appliance, making edge computing a financially viable and practical option for more organizations. Our ability to deliver HCI technology in a smaller form factor and lower price point is making edge computing capabilities and resources more accessible to many organizations.”

Lightbits Labs debuts initial NVMe/TCP clustered storage offering that helps protect against data loss and service interruption at scale

Lightbits Labs, provider of NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP) software-defined disaggregated storage, advanced  on Wednesday its software solution, LightOS, to deliver the first NVMe/TCP clustered storage solution.

With more companies moving away from direct attached storage (DAS), and with storage requirements typically growing far faster than compute requirements, both public-cloud providers and private-cloud builders are looking for ways to separate storage and compute so each can scale separately. 

One of the limiting factors to scaling disaggregated storage, however, is the need for high availability across clusters of storage and compute. Lightbits LightOS delivers the availability, flexibility and efficiency of hyperscale cloud infrastructure to on-premise data centers.

LightOS provides software-defined disaggregated storage for cloud data centers delivering similar performance as direct-attached NVMe SSDs and up to a 50 percent reduction in tail latency; independent scaling of storage and compute, driving better infrastructure utilization and efficiency and providing unparalleled flexibility; and standards-based NVMe/TCP block storage access protocol for application servers to storage servers communication

LightOS clusters leverage standard NVMe 1.4 multipathing and offers data replications on storage target side, which provides transparency to the client with quick failover. It also includes distributed and durable cluster management with fast failover handling; no single point of failure in data and control paths, and allows multiple LightOS clusters can exist in the same cloud data center and can be aggregated and managed as one large cloud-scale block storage solution.

LightOS is now the first NVMe/TCP storage solution that protects against data loss and avoids service interruptions at scale. In the presence of server, storage, or network failures, LightOS maximizes operational efficiency, ensuring applications continue working in the presence of failures, and failover is handled automatically, keeping data fully consistent and available.

The average cost of IT downtime is enormous. According to Gartner, the average loss is $5,600 per minute. This can add up to more than half a million dollars lost per hour at the higher end.

“At cloud scale, everything fails, so we built LightOS to capture all the benefits of disaggregated storage while providing exceptional durability and availability to prevent service disruption,” said Kam Eshghi, chief strategy officer at Lightbits Labs.

For cloud-native applications, access to available, performant and deployable infrastructure is key to business agility and application experience, at any scale - regardless of whether deployed as five nodes, five hundred nodes, or thousands of nodes.

Installed on commodity servers in large-scale data centers, LightOS is optimized for I/O intensive compute clusters, such as Cassandra, MySQL, MongoDB, and time series databases. With end-to-end NVMe, LightOS delivers high performance and consistently low latency. The result is a 10 times increase in storage reliability and 50 percent decrease in total cost of ownership (TCO). 

As a standard-based, target-only solution that does not require installing any proprietary software on the client side, the ease of deployment at scale is unmatched. LightOS is built to run in existing data center, requiring no changes to application servers or network infrastructure, so that deploying it at scale is a breeze.

As LightOS provides highly available, flexible, and efficient disaggregated storage, application teams can focus their efforts on developing new services to achieve their business goals, while lowering spend and delivering high performance.

Microsoft validates Lenovo ThinkSystem SE350 edge server for Azure Stack HCI

Microsoft and Lenovo have teamed up to validate the Lenovo ThinkSystem SE350 for Microsoft's Azure Stack HCI program. The ThinkSystem SE350 was designed and built with the unique requirements of edge servers in mind. It is versatile enough to stretch the limitations of server locations, providing a variety of connectivity and security options and can be easily managed with Lenovo XClarity Controller. 

The ThinkSystem SE350 solution has a focus on smart connectivity, business security, and manageability for the harsh environment.

The ThinkSystem SE350 is the latest workhorse for the edge. Designed and built with the unique requirements for edge servers in mind, it is versatile enough to stretch the limitations of server locations, providing a variety of connectivity and security options and is easily managed with Lenovo XClarity Controller. 

The ThinkSystem SE350 is a rugged compact-sized edge solution with a focus on smart connectivity, business security, and manageability for the harsh environment.

The ThinkSystem SE350 is an Intel Xeon D processor-based server, with a 1U height, half-width and short depth case that can go anywhere. Mount it on a wall, stack it on a shelf, or install it in a rack. This rugged edge server can handle anything from 0-55°C as well as full performance in high dust and vibration environments.

Information availability is another challenging issue for users at the edge, who require insight into their operations at all times to ensure they are making the right decisions. The ThinkSystem SE350 is designed to provide several connectivity options with wired and secure wireless Wi-Fi and LTE connection ability. This purpose-built compact server is reliable for a wide variety of edge and IoT workloads.

Azure Stack HCI solutions bring together highly virtualized compute, storage, and networking on industry-standard x86 servers and components. Combining resources in the same cluster makes it easier to deploy, manage, and scale, while managing command-line automation or Windows Admin Center.

Consumers can achieve virtual machine (VM) performance for server applications with Hyper-V, the foundational hypervisor technology of the Microsoft cloud, and Storage Spaces Direct technology with built-in support for non-volatile memory express (NVMe), persistent memory, and remote direct memory access (RDMA) networking.

KIOXIA’s KumoScale software now put on UNH-IOL NVMe-oF integrator’s list

KIOXIA America (formerly Toshiba Memory America), the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corp., announced this week that its KumoScale storage software with NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) v3.11 has been added to The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory’s (UNH-IOL) official Integrator’s List. 

In order to be considered for inclusion on the list, technologies must undergo conformance testing performed by the UNH-IOL through laboratory tests or during an NVMe plugfest. Successful completion of this testing provides a level of assurance that the product being tested will function properly in NVMe-oF environments.

Developed with a strong focus on virtualizing, managing and securing data, the KumoScale software suite provides a feature-rich storage abstraction for containers and virtual machines. It delivers secure flash access, API access to orchestration frameworks, among other capabilities, and takes advantage of the unique performance characteristics of NVMe SSDs. 

KumoScale software was the first storage software technology to be granted NVMe-oF certification by the UNH-IOL, and KIOXIA America continues to submit new releases of the software suite for certification. 

“Ensuring the interoperability of technologies with the NVMe standards is at the heart of what we do,” noted David Woolf, senior engineer, Datacenter Technologies, UNH-IOL. “KumoScale block storage software was the first of its kind to be listed on the NVMe-oF Integrator’s List back in 2017. We commend KIOXIA for their continued software innovations and for making NVMe-oF more deployable in cloud data centers.”

nCorium, KIOXIA America, EchoStreams come together to deliver high-performance storage platform based on PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs

nCorium, in collaboration with KIOXIA America, Inc.(formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corporation, and EchoStreams Innovative Solutions Inc. announced a new storage acceleration platform. 

Based on nCorium’s second-generation, near-memory acceleration engines, KIOXIA’s PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs and EchoStreams’ FlacheStreams Storage Server, this fully integrated solution is designed to perform storage functions in-line and stripe data to local or remote flash storage.

Applications such as high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence, deep learning, data analytics, computer-aided engineering, climate modeling, and entertainment rely on parallel file systems to achieve high-throughput storage they require. 

As disk drives in parallel file systems are rapidly replaced by high-bandwidth SSDs, the processing capabilities of traditional architectures simply fail to keep up. nCorium’s storage acceleration platform delivers improved capabilities by offloading compute-intensive functions to the near memory acceleration engines called nCorium Compute in Memory Modules (nCIMMs).

Kingston Technology releases NVMe SSD QoS benchmarks for HPC architectures

Kingston Digital Inc., a flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, demonstrated on Wednesday its server DRAM and latest NVMe PCIe Flash solutions for high performance computing (HPC) at Supercomputing 2019 (SC19). Supercomputing is an international conference that brings together the high-performance computing community. 

Kingston will demonstrate the consistent data performance and reliability of its forthcoming DC1000M U.2 NVMe SSD, purpose-built for data-intensive enterprise workloads and HPC architectures at the forefront of new artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications.

During SC19, Kingston and Madison Cloud will demonstrate Private MultiCloud Storage (PMCS) architecture, providing a unified storage fabric for cloud and on-premise installations. 

Designed to keep data close to the Cloud without actually putting it in the Cloud, PMCS deploys the same storage platform wherever you are, providing the products and support that system builders need to move at the speed of Cloud. The two companies will showcase how users can run real-time MultiCloud workloads from a PMCS server in a MultiCloud architecture, built with Kingston DRAM, SATA and NVMe SSDs, providing consistent performance and a wide range of enterprise class features compared to cloud-native storage products.

Kingston will further demonstrate specific architectural advancements for Big Data and ML applications with the upcoming DC1000M U.2 NVMe SSD and recently launched DC500 SATA data center SSDs. 

The big data workflows validate possibilities for 10-bay NVMe server configurations while delivering 5.8 million IOPS at a sustained bandwidth of 23.8Gb/s. Kingston’s third demo presents ML application learning by naming thousands of satellite images per second as the DC1000M alleviates storage bottlenecks, accelerates large data sets and optimizes NVIDIA GPU performance for ML.

“Today’s supercomputers are powering a multitude of applications that are at the forefront of progress ― from oil and gas exploration to weather predictions, financial markets to developing new technologies,” said Keith Schimmenti, enterprise SSD business manager, Kingston. “These HPC applications require far greater consistency of performance and IO delivery. We are proud to share how Kingston’s solutions are an integral part of the stack behind the next breakthroughs in computing, providing the performance required in the world’s most extreme computing environments and applications.”

KIOXIA’s PCIe 4.0 enterprise NVMe SSDs strengthens storage performance; achieves PCI-SIG compliance and NVMe certification

KIOXIA America Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corp., announced Wednesday that its lineup of PCIe 4.0 NVMe enterprise solid state drives (SSDs) has achieved PCI-SIG compliance for PCIe 4.0 and University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) certification. 

KIOXIA’s CM6 Series passed interoperability tests at the August 2019 PCI-SIG Compliance Workshop – that includes official PCIe 4.0 specification tests. KIOXIA America will be on hand at Supercomputing 2019 later this month to showcase new levels of flash performance enabled by its CM6 Series SSDs. 

KIOXIA develops PCIe 4.0 NVM Express SSDs and continues to push the limits of flash storage performance. The CM6 Series brings planned performance improvements of three times over its PCIe 3.0 predecessors and is 12 times faster than SATA drives. KIOXIA’s lineup of Gen4 PCIe SSDs also includes the CD6 Series, which is targeted to cloud and scale-out environments.

The PCIe 4.0 NVMe enterprise SSDs utilizes KIOXIA’s 96-layer BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory, PCIe 2x2 or 1x4 lane configuration options, targeted transfer rates up to 6,900 megabytes per second; and supports SFF-TA-1001 (also known as U.3) operation with universal backplanes for simplified customer use with SAS, SATA and NVMe SSDs.

KIOXIA was at Microsoft Ignite earlier this month to demonstrate the CM6 Series running in a Microsoft Azure hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform with Quanta Cloud Technologies – and enabling twice performance gains over a PCIe 3.0 solution. 

“We were able to show that our CM6 Series SSDs are capable of pushing SSD sequential read performance to over 55 gigabytes per second (GB/s) across eight drives – nearly 7GB/s per SSD – and we’re not done yet. KIOXIA will continue to push the performance envelope for our customers,” noted Alvaro Toledo, vice president of SSD marketing and product planning for KIOXIA America.

PCI-SIG hosts Compliance Workshops several times a year in various locations worldwide, giving members the opportunity to test and validate their products before entering the field. Compliance testing is completed against both PCI-SIG maintained systems and other manufacturers of PCI products. 

As the key testing and certification lab for NVMe technology and software, the UNH-IOL provides conformance and interoperability testing across various operating systems, drivers, and hardware platforms, as well as PCIe SSDs and PCIe-enabled servers. “The SSD market is quickly moving to NVM Express technology, and standards compliance is critical to ensure smooth adoption,” added Toledo.