NGD Systems, Inc., the leader in computational storage, today announced the general availability (GA) of the 16 terabyte (TB) Catalina-2 U.2 NVMe solid state drive (SSD). The Catalina-2 is the first NVMe SSD with 16TB capacity that also makes available NGD's powerful "In-Situ Processing" capabilities. The Catalina-2 does this without impact to the reliability, quality of service (QoS) or power consumption, already available in the current shipping NGD Products.

The use of Arm multi-core processors in Catalina-2 provides users with a well-understood development environment and the combination of exceptional performance with low power consumption. The Arm-based In-Situ Processing platform allows NGD Systems to pack both high capacity and computational ability into the first 16TB 2.5-inch form factor package on the market. The NGD Catalina-2 U.2 NVMe SSD only consumes 12W (0.75W/TB) of power, compared to the 25W or more used by other NVMe solutions. This provides the highest energy efficiency in the industry."With the exponential growth of big data, AI/ML, and IoT, more processing power and storage is required at the edge," said Neil Werdmuller, director, storage solutions, Arm. "By including multiple Arm cores into its SSDs, NGD Systems delivers the computation required at the edge and the ability to scale processing in step with storage growth. This is achieved within a very tight power budget and without adding expensive additional processors, memory or GPUs."

NGD Systems' 16TB Catalina-2 creates a paradigm shift that permits large data sets, near real-time analytics, high-density, and low cost to coexist. A single standard 2U server available with 48 hot-swappable U.2 bays can reach 768TB, over three-quarters of a petabyte (PB). The In-Situ SSDs augment the server processing power with the availability of the embedded 64-bit ARM application processors. NGD Systems demonstrated the value of computational storage with over 500x improvement in a 3M vector similarity search at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit last month in San Jose, Calif.

"Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Computer Vision (CV) applications are all restricted by today's traditional storage technology," said Eli Tiomkin, Vice President of Business Development, NGD Systems. "The NGD Systems In-Situ Processing capabilities embedded in the world's first 16TB U.2 In-Situ SSD allows our customers to deal with data sets in a manner that truly enables AI at the Edge."

The NGD Systems Catalina-2 U.2 is in production now and is available for immediate deployment. The Catalina-2 U.2 SSD is available in capacities of 4TB, 8TB, and the world's only 16TB NVMe Computational Storage product.