KIOXIA: The Past, Present and Future of Enterprise and Data Center SSD Innovation

The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise and Data Center SSD Innovation

KIOXIA has a long history of being a NAND flash leader – starting with having invented the technology 35 years ago. Fast forward to now, this decade has already been a busy one for KIOXIA, with many great products and innovations in the enterprise and data center flash storage space. 

Let’s take a quick look back, shall we? In February 2020, KIOXIA was first to market1 with PCIe® 4.0 enterprise and data center class SSDs - KIOXIA CM6 Series and CD6 Series. We followed that up a few months later with the KIOXIA PM6 Series, the industry’s first2 24G SAS drive. In 2021 came our XL-FLASH™ based KIOXIA FL6 Series drive, a competitor to storage class memory drives, delivering low latency and high endurance for the most demanding enterprise and hyperscale workloads. Later that year, we announced the KIOXIA XD6 Series; our first Open Compute Project specification aligned Datacenter NVMeTM SSD with Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E1.S drive. And we weren’t done yet! KIOXIA also announced the industry’s first3 EDSFF E3.S SSD – the KIOXIA CD7 Series. The year 2022 was just as busy, with the KIOXIA CM7 Series revealed in June - our first PCIe 5.0 enterprise drive. 

That’s a tremendous amount of innovation in a short amount of time. Technology is progressing at an incredible pace, and that constant change is something that we thrive on. For example, we are excited for our KIOXIA CM7 and CD8 SSDs to make their way into the market this year, bringing cutting edge technologies to our datacenter and enterprise customers. Additionally, KIOXIA CM7 and CD8 are among a larger portfolio of SSDs that comply with SED and FIPS security requirements.    

Despite all of this great innovation from KIOXIA, the best is yet to come. We have big plans to bring the latest technologies to our enterprise and data center products to really push the envelope. Work is in progress on our next generations of BiCS FLASH™ 3D flash memory which will incorporate the latest in interface speeds, performance, reliability, and cost improvements. Our second-generation XL-FLASH will bring MLC into the storage class memory space for an improved balance of cost and performance. Rest assured, KIOXIA is investigating how our BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory and XL-FLASH can be combined with future technologies to enable and accelerate big data analytics, AI/ML, and deep learning training. I have no doubt that the future will be full of innovative, exciting changes - and KIOXIA is ready for next!


1: As of February 21, 2020

2: As of June 16, 2020

3. As of November 9, 2021

PCI Express and PCIe are registered trademarks of PCI-SIG.

The NVMe word mark is a registered and unregistered trademark and service mark of NVM Express, Inc.

The Open Compute Project and OCP marks are owned by and used with the permission of the Open Compute Project Foundation

Definition of capacity: KIOXIA Corporation defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a terabyte (TB) as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1Gb = 2^30 bits = 1,073,741,824 bits, 1GB = 2^30 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes and 1TB = 2^40 bytes = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes and therefore shows less storage capacity. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system, and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.

Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of KIOXIA America, Inc.

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