OCP Global Summit: Lite-On to Ship Project Denali Compliant SSDs

Lite-On Storage will ship its first storage drive supporting the recently-approved Project Denali 1.0 specification this summer.

Announced at the 2019 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit in San Jose, CA, the company said its Open Channel AD2 series SSD, built in collaboration with CNEX Labs, Inc., developer of a transformative architecture for SSD controllers, will give data center organizations an option for improving performance and reducing costs related to cloud and enterprise-based workloads.

“We’ve been at this for quite a while, and with recent progress building out the Project Denali spec, we believe we’ll be ready to ship in the second quarter of this year,” said Darlo Perez, MD, Americas region, Lite-On. “For our customers, this should mean massive potential improvements in QoS for cloud computing and enterprise storage. We couldn’t be more excited.“

“Lite-On is advanced in applying the latest technology to improve its SSD capabilities for customers, and its work with CNEX’s high performance Denali and NVMe SSD controller to introduce Project Denali SSDs is no exception,” said Justin Heindel, VP, marketing and business development, CNEX Labs. “Project Denali SSDs will provide a powerful tool for next-generation enterprise and cloud storage infrastructure to achieve unprecedented flexibility for performance and cost optimizations in a variety of workloads.“

Project Denali is a standardization and evolution of Open Channel SSD technology that defines the roles of SSD versus that of the host in a standard interface, according to Microsoft Corp. Media management, error correction, mapping of bad blocks and other functionality specific to the flash generation stays on the device while the host receives random writes, transmits streams of sequential writes, maintains the address map, and performs garbage collection. The technology is effective in installations that have Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) or microcontrollers to provide SSD aggregation and storage offload functionality.

Backers of Project Denali believe this storage architecture advancement could reduce costs for SSD deployment, improve performance, making these drives more useful and cost-effective for enterprise organizations and cloud service providers.

The company also has showcased its next-generation form factor, EDSFF (Enterprise and Datacenter SSD Form Factor) SSD, the AD5 16TB, which it built in concert with CNEX Labs. This solution delivers storage density, system design flexibility, thermal efficiency, scalable performance and easy maintenance with front-load hot swap capabilities. The hardware design also supports low-latency, 3D TLC and low-cost QLC NAND flash based depending on customer cloud applications.

Read also:
FMS: Lite-On Showcased Early Storage Device Supporting ‘Project Denali’
Microsoft storage specification for cloud-based workloads
August 14, 2018 | Press Release
Microsoft Announcing Project Denali With Cnex Labs
Standardizes SSD firmware interfaces by disaggregating functionality for software-defined data layout and media management.
March 30, 2018 | Press Release
Microsoft: Project Denali to Define Flexible SSDs for Cloud-Scale Applications
Provides flexibility needed to optimize for workloads of variety of cloud applications.
March 27, 2018 | Press Release