KIOXIA America, Inc. will showcase a prototype broadband SSD with an optical interface for next-generation data centers at the FMS: the Future of Memory and Storage conference, being held in Santa Clara, California from August 6 to August 8. By replacing the electrical wiring interface with an optical interface, this SSD technology allows for greater physical distance between the compute and storage devices, slims down wiring and delivers high flexibility to data center system designs and applications—all while maintaining energy efficiency and high signal quality.

By adopting an optical interface, it becomes possible to aggregate individual components that make up systems, such as SSDs and CPUs, and seamlessly interconnect them. This furthers the evolution of a disaggregated computing system that can efficiently utilize resources according to a specific workload. Additionally, with its high signal integrity, the optical interface may enhance high-performance compute (HPC) environments, such as in supercomputers, cloud based-HPC and even applications in outer space.This accomplishment is the result of the Japanese Next Generation Green Data Center Technology Development Project funded by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), which is under the Green Innovation Fund Project: Construction of Next Generation Digital Infrastructure. In this grant project, next generation technologies are being developed with the goal of achieving more than 40% energy savings compared to current data centers1. As a part of this project, KIOXIA is developing broadband SSDs with optical interfaces for data storage in next-generation green data centers.