Feed: AnandTech
Feed Link: https://www.anandtech.com
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Title: Kioxia Demonstrates Optical Interface SSDs for Data Centers

Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2024 12:00:00 EDT
Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21520/kioxia-d...

A few years back, the Japanese government's New Energy and Industrial
Technology Development Organization (NEDO ) allocated funding for the
development of green datacenter technologies. With the aim to obtain up to
40% savings in overall power consumption, several Japanese companies have
been developing an optical interface for their enterprise SSDs. And at this
year's FMS, Kioxia had their optical interface on display.

For this demonstration, Kioxia took its existing CM7 enterprise SSD and
created an optical interface for it. A PCIe card with on-board optics
developed by Kyocera is installed in the server slot. An optical interface
allows data transfer over long distances (it was 40m in the demo, but Kioxia
promises lengths of up to 100m for the cable in the future). This allows the
storage to be kept in a separate room with minimal cooling requirements
compared to the rack with the CPUs and GPUs. Disaggregation of different
server components will become an option as very high throughput interfaces
such as PCIe 7.0 (with 128 GT/s rates) become available.

The demonstration of the optical SSD showed a slight loss in IOPS
performance, but a significant advantage in the latency metric over the
shipping enterprise SSD behind a copper network link. Obviously, there are
advantages in wiring requirements and signal integrity maintenance with
optical links.

Being a proof-of-concept demonstration, we do see the requirement for an
industry-standard approach if this were to gain adoption among different
datacenter vendors. The PCI-SIG optical workgroup will need to get its act
together soon to create a standards-based approach to this problem.

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