Call it a collaboration between two closely related vendors: Supermicro, known for its high performance server and storage solutions, has teamed up with Phison, a provider of NAND flash controllers and storage products, to unveil what they tout as “one of the most advanced server solutions in the market.”
The launch targets customers of Supermicro’s Petascale Storage Family, a line of high-density storage solutions—in various form factors—geared for the heavy duty data processing required by AI, HPC and big data. These units use NVMe SSDs along with CXL and PCIe Gen5 to drive capacity and performance. The hardware incorporates chips from a number of vendors, including NVIDIA GPUs.
Customers of these Petascale units will now be able to use Phison’s 122.88 TB Pascari D205V SSD, a high capacity unit with the E3.L form factor and Gen5 NVMe processing performance. The Gen5 is the latest generation high speed storage hardware, and enables read speeds up to 14,000 MB/s and write speeds to 12,700 MB/s. The resulting hardware units push the upper limits of storage density and—important for today’s AI workloads—scalability in enterprise IT infrastructure. Additionally, the hardware is designed for thermal efficiency, which is significant in today’s data center environment where cooling can be a major challenge.
Phison’s E3.L form factor is a feature based on the Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF), an industry standard developed by Storage Networking Industry Association with the goal of addressing limitations of current SSD form factors and developing better options for enterprises. The E3.L has been developed to support high-density, next-gen performance computing environments and are hot-pluggable and front accessible.
Central to the significance of the E3.L’s specifications is that they are architected for the demands of AI workloads. When contrasted with the U.3 design, E3.L provides a longer form factor that offers twice the capacity of the E3.S, in addition to better airflow and correspondingly more efficient thermal management. These features also make the E3.L suitable for large hyperscale environments, as well as the space and cooling limitations of edge computing use cases.
“This innovative collaboration with Supermicro sets a precedent to keep pace with the increasing storage demands of tomorrow,” said Michael Wu, GM and President at Phison US. “Customers can expect their storage solutions to have built-in scalability and cost optimizing features from the drive to the rack architecture.”
This combined product from Phison and Supermicro is part of a larger trend by IT vendors to create gear with super-charged specifications to meet the demands of machine learning and AI. Enterprise customers are looking for more storage and compute capacity per slot, which allows data admins to reduce rack space and, optimally, lower operating costs.
Phison, founded in 2000 and based in Taiwan, builds controllers for NAND flash memory chips that are incorporated into a broad range of flash drives, memory cards and SSDs. Supermicro, founded in 1993 and based in San Jose, California, produces an extensive line of HPC servers, as well as server management and storage solutions. The company is a leading vendor in the enterprise data center and cloud computing sectors.
