Samsung targets server CPUs with its new SSD

At this week's OCP Global Summit, Samsung disclosed details about a new type of solid-state drive (SSD), E-SSD drive that will achieve PCIe Gen4x4 performance, or about 1500K IOPS at 4K random read. They claim that these drives scale in a linear fashion. In the event, Samsung also revealed that it is currently in development and in the datacenter context.

When it is about flash memory, the most simple and common configuration of data centers is JBOF (just a bunch of files), which uses NVMe (Non-volatile memory express) SSD storage which is attached with processors, PCIe switches, and a NIC (Network Interface Cards). Such a system has some significant problems which are a classic case of a middleman, those issues include the lack of scalability of the storage controller or limited bandwidth. Based on the chart provided by the company, 24 NVMe drives will be about 7.5x faster than a single NVMe drive, whereas the same number of NVMe-oF SSDs will be about 23x faster than a single drive. Removing the CPU, networking and other bottlenecks means lower latency, higher bandwidth, lower cost, better performance, and potentially big TCO savings. Great news for data center operators, but not so great for everyone else in hardware procurement.