Flash Memory Summit: Kazan Networks to Demo Ethernet-Attached Bunch of Flash

Kazan Networks Corporation demonstrated a fast Ethernet-attached Bunch of Flash (EBOF) at the Flash Memory Summit.

NVMe over Fabrics enables disaggregation
of compute and storage without sacrificing performance.

With 24 SSDs running in a 2U enclosure, the company’s NVMe over Fabrics interfaces deliver over 15 million IO/s, believed to represent a high-water mark in performance.

Partnered with Sanmina Corp.–Newisys and leveraging their NVMe-oF EBOF system, six of the firm’s bridges provide a total of 600Gb/s of Ethernet bandwidth, equating to just over 60GB/s. These levels of performance enable an entirely new datacenter architecture, where scalable pools of storage can be accessed and shared by hundreds, or even thousands, of servers.

“We are thrilled to be demonstrating something this year which will soon begin deploying in real datacenters worldwide,” stated Joe Steinmetz, CEO, Kazan. “One year ago we demonstraed the concept of an NVMe-oF EBOF, and this year we’re showing the real thing, a tremendous accomplishment by our team.“

The advantages to disaggregating storage are numerous, but at the top of the list is cost savings: By providing flexibility in how much storage to connect to each application, storage utilization can be approximately doubled, meaning that less storage is required.

Also in the company’s booth was demonstrations of Intel Corp.‘s Optane SSD, connected via NVMe-oF, and a multi-domain analyzer system from Viavi Solutions, Inc. All demonstrations center around the company’s Magma NVMe-oF bridge adapter, available to order by customers.