LITE-ON Storage, an established leader in the rapidly expanding solid-state drive (SSD) industry, revealed today it will ship its first storage drive supporting the recently-approved Project Denali 1.0 specification this summer.
Announced at the 2019 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit in San Jose, Calif., LITE-ON said its new Open Channel AD2 series SSD, built in collaboration with CNEX Labs, developer of a transformative architecture for SSD controllers, will give data center organizations a powerful option for improving performance and reducing costs related to cloud and enterprise-based workloads.
“We’ve been at this for quite a while, and with recent progress building out the Project Denali spec, we believe we’ll be ready to ship in the second quarter of this year,” said Darlo Perez, Managing Director of the Americas region for LITE-ON. “For our customers, this should mean massive potential improvements in quality of service (QoS) for cloud computing and enterprise storage. We couldn’t be more excited.”
“LITE-ON is advanced in applying the latest technology to improve its SSD capabilities for customers, and its work with CNEX’s high performance Denali and NVMe SSD controller to introduce Project Denali SSDs is no exception,” said Justin Heindel, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at CNEX Labs. “Project Denali SSDs will provide a powerful tool for next-generation enterprise and cloud storage infrastructure to achieve unprecedented flexibility for performance and cost optimizations in a variety of workloads.”
Project Denali is a standardization and evolution of Open Channel SSD technology that defines the roles of SSD versus that of the host in a standard interface, according to Microsoft. Media management, error correction, mapping of bad blocks and other functionality specific to the flash generation stays on the device while the host receives random writes, transmits streams of sequential writes, maintains the address map, and performs garbage collection. The technology is highly effective in installations that have Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) or microcontrollers to provide SSD aggregation and storage offload functionality.
Backers of Project Denali believe this storage architecture advancement could greatly reduce costs for SSD deployment, improve performance, making these drives more useful and cost-effective for both enterprise organizations and cloud service providers.
LITE-ON will also showcase its next-generation form factor, EDSFF (Enterprise & Datacenter SSD Form Factor) SSD, the AD5 16TB, which it built in concert with CNEX Labs. This new solution delivers storage density, system design flexibility, thermal efficiency, scalable performance and easy maintenance with front-load hot swap capabilities. The hardware design also supports low-latency, 3D TLC and low-cost QLC NAND flash based depending on customer cloud applications.
To see any of LITE-ON’s solutions or to learn more, please visit Booth C7 at the San Jose Convention Center and come hear LITE-ON Storage Principal Engineer, Jeffery Chang’s presentation at the OCP event at 1:10 p.m. on Friday, March 15.
