LITE-ON Storage Previewed the First EDSFF 1U Solid-state Drive

Nowadays, SSD becomes more and more popular for PC users due to its superiority in speed and performance. Many people are concerned about the price of SSD and its development. At the Flash Memory Summit (FMS) in 2018, LITE-ON Storage previewed the first EDSFF 1U solid-state drive (SSD), which was developed by working with CNEX Labs.

By working with such partners, LITE-ON provides an innovative and highly efficient storage solution for scalable computing aligned with the Open Computing Project (OCP) specifications. The fruit of the two companies’ cooperation, EDSFF (Enterprise and Datacenter SSD Form Factor) SSD, will provide a more cost-effective solution for enterprise and hyperscale cloud environments, producing good results without costing a lot of money.

Charlie Tseng, CEO of LITE-ON Storage, believes that standard SSD solutions play an important role in handling many typical business workloads. But storing information in cloud and data center infrastructures is very complicate. So, SSD firmware needs to be very flexible and adaptable.

The new LITE-ON SSD EDSFF solution provides storage density, system design flexibility, thermal efficiency, scalable performance and easy maintenance with front-load hot swap capabilities. In addition, the hardware design also supports low-latency, 3D TLC and low-cost QLC NAND flash according to end-users’ specific cloud applications.

Utilizing the CNEX controller’s flexible dual-mode interface support, the LITE-ON SSD EDSFF protocol can be configured between traditional NVMe logic block addressing and the upcoming Danili software-defined interface (formerly Open Channel SSD).

Dr. Alan Armstrong, CEO and Co-Founder of CNEX Labs noted that CNEX is very excited to be working with LITE-ON on next-generation SSDs for cloud infrastructure. SSD is experiencing explosive growth because of its great performance and advantage in speed, but the industry must go beyond traditional design to provide more advanced, flexible and economical solutions for non-heterogeneous environments.

Combined with LITE-ON, they bring this to reality through CNEX’s hardware design expertise and particular low-latency SSD controllers which boast great performance, QoS, low power consumption, and flexible support for media technologies and supplier. LITE-ON SSD EDSSF aims to provide maximum flexibility for non-heterogeneous and fast-growing cloud workloads – from high IOPS-density artificial intelligence (AI) and compute-intensive applications to high-capacity density near-line storage use cases. EDSFF 1U Long form factor and 16TB of Toshiba Memory Corporation BiCS3 3D TLC NAND are supported by the original design. However, by using QLC technology, the capacity can reach as high as 80TB.

EDSFF 1U solid-state drive is so powerful and many people are expecting its coming. However the new SSD’s release date has not been announced yet.

LITE-ON Storage

LITE-ON Storage is a Strategic Business Group of LITE-ON Technology Corporation. And it is a global leader in the design, development and manufacturing of Solid-State Drives (SSDs) for PC Client, Industrial Solutions, Automotive, Enterprise and Cloud Computing.

The LITE-ON SSD solution has a variety of interfaces and sizes that are able to provide the right product for the right application and can be highly customized using industry-leading key components.

All LITE-ON SSDs are designed for innovation, for quality, and for performance, all built internally with Taiwan’s most advanced equipment.

CNEX Labs

CNEX Labs was founded in 2013. As a private semiconductor company funded by venture capital and strategic investments from Fortune 500 companies in storage and networking, it provides solid-state storage controllers and software for cloud, hyperscale, and enterprise data centers.