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Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

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Re: Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

#21

There's been a lot of talk about orbital DCs lately, but with these levels of density, orbital CDNs might be a more obvious usecase. It would be interesting to see if something like Starlink can use something like this to cache media content and reduce their overall data moving through the constellation. It could even be worth it to have some satellites in higher orbits (even GEO if the ground hw can reach it) dedica…

If I correctly understand what you're suggesting, then that could save on uplink bandwidth. Sending one copy into space, and then sending it back down over and over again sounds nice.

But does it solve a problem that we actually have? Is uplink bandwidth a pressing limitation?

Re: Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

#25
This is one of the case limited by PCIe speed, sharing it with SSD so Network could only do 5x400Gbps Network. This is on PCIe 5.0, luckily we have 7.0 spec ready and 8.0 is even in 0.5 draft status.

If we could somehow increase the density further by 5x, we would be able to store 1EB in a single rack.

The most interesting part to me is the last sentence.

>Scality tells us it’s working on supporting a future nearline-class SSD from Samsung, viewed as an HDD killer, with similar or even larger capacity and a roadmap out to a 1 PB drive.

Finally a HDD killer. May be in another 5 - 10 years time. The day of everyone having an SSD NAS / AI Cloud at home will come.

Re: Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

#26
post #20
post #16

[flagged]

Not quite yet. The interesting thing here is ~256TB in a single drive, but it's in E3.L form factor. I have about 160TB on hard drives that I'm waiting to offload onto a single SSD. But that needs to come with a connector that has adapters to USB-C, so I can attach it to my Macbook Neo. Hopefully they get it a bit more dense soon and into the 2.5" NVMe form.

There's a ton of different adapters already between edsff connector used for e3 / e2 / e1 drives and everything else pcie already (pcie, m.2, u.2). For example this pcie card. (Good luck tweaking your equalizer settings jumpers by hand though, whew!!) https://www.microsatacables.com/pcie-x8-gen4-with-redriver-t...

Drop that in one of the many usb4 to pcie docks and you should be good to go. Pretty fugly but it ought to just work! I think there's some cheaper models that are under $90 still available, but here's a listing. https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2835.html

I believe a more focused dedicated usbNVMe chip might also work, if attached to an edsff connector. I didnt look hard, but I haven't seen any such products yet, but: it's mostly mechanical/packaging, some signal integrity checks, but generally wouldn't really be much different in the end than a NVMe adapter. Seems very doable.

Build it! Someone could sell (to quote a Daily Show) literally dozens of said adapter! (Eventually probably many many more, but not a huge second hand market for edsff atm).

Re: Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

#27

Can't wait to move my spinning rust NAS to this in 20 years.

I've been wanting to update my (100TB) NAS for over five years, but I haven't yet found anything that I feel is worth upgrading to. One of these with a QSFP56 interface would be nice, but I would need to sell one of my houses to pay for it, so I'll be waiting a little longer...

Re: Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

#28
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite yet. The interesting thing here is ~256TB in a single drive, but it's in E3.L form factor. I have about 160TB on hard drives that I'm waiting to offload onto a single SSD. But that needs to come with a connector that has adapters to USB-C, so I can attach it to my Macbook Neo. Hopefully they get it a bit more dense soon and into the 2.5" NVMe form.

There's a ton of different adapters already between edsff connector used for e3 / e2 / e1 drives and everything else pcie already (pcie, m.2, u.2). For example this pcie card. (Good luck tweaking your equalizer settings jumpers by hand though, whew!!) https://www.microsatacables.com/pcie-x8-gen4-with-redriver-t... Drop that in one of the many usb4 to pcie docks and you should be good to go. Pretty fugly but it ought…

It needs to be portable/travel-friendly, something like this: https://global.icydock.com/product_327.html

Re: Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

#30

There's been a lot of talk about orbital DCs lately, but with these levels of density, orbital CDNs might be a more obvious usecase. It would be interesting to see if something like Starlink can use something like this to cache media content and reduce their overall data moving through the constellation. It could even be worth it to have some satellites in higher orbits (even GEO if the ground hw can reach it) dedica…

no, absolutely not. orbital datacenters are never going to happen, it doesn't matter whether you try to frame them as compute or storage or whatever else.

the extreme density of these SSDs is actually an anti-feature in the context of spacecraft hardware.

the RAD750 CPU [0] for example uses a 150nm process node. its successor the RAD5500 [1] is down to 45nm. that's an order of magnitude larger than chips currently made for terrestrial uses.

radiation-hardening involves a lot of things, but in general the more tightly packed the transistors are, the more susceptible the chip is to damage. sending these SSDs to space would be an absurd waste of money because of how quickly they would degrade.

and then there's the power consumption & heat dissipation. one of these drives draws 25W [2] and Dell is bragging about cramming 40 of them into one server. that's a full kilowatt of power - essentially a space heater in a 2U form factor.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500

2: https://americas.kioxia.com/content/dam/kioxia/en-us/busines...

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