Fueling the next wave of AI innovation, Western Digital today introduced a six-stage AI Data Cycle framework that defines the optimal storage mix for AI workloads at scale. This framework will help customers plan and develop advanced storage infrastructures to maximize their AI investments, improve efficiency, and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their AI workflows. AI models operate in a continuous loop of data consumption and generation - processing text, images, audio and video among other data types while simultaneously producing new unique data. As AI technologies become more advanced, data storage systems must deliver the capacity and performance to support the computational loads and speeds required for large, sophisticated models while managing immense volumes of data. Western Digital has strategically aligned its Flash and HDD product and technology roadmaps to the storage requirements of each critical stage of the cycle, and today introduced a new industry-leading, high-performance PCIe Gen 5 SSD to support AI training and inference; a high-capacity 64 TB SSD for fast AI data lakes; and the world's highest capacity ePMR, UltraSMR 32 TB HDD for cost-effective storage at scale.

"There's no doubt that Generative AI is the next transformational technology, and storage is a critical enabler. The implications for storage are expected to be significant as the role of storage, and access to data, influences the speed, efficiency and accuracy of AI Models, especially as larger and higher-quality data sets become more prevalent," said Ed Burns, Research Director at IDC. "As a leader in Flash and HDD, Western Digital has an opportunity to benefit in this growing AI landscape with its strong market position and broad portfolio, which meets a variety of needs within the different AI data cycle stages."

Phison Electronics, a leading provider of NAND controllers and storage solutions, today announced aiDAPTIV+ partnerships with ASUS, Gigabyte, MAINGEAR, and MediaTek. At GTC 2024, Phison and partners will demonstrate aiDAPTIV+, a hybrid hardware and software large language model (LLMs) fine-tune training solution that enables small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to process and retain local control of their sensitive machine learning (ML) data.

Foundational training of LLMs gives a broad understanding of language but aiDAPTIV+ enables the fine-tuning process that molds these models into specialized tools capable of understanding the topics that deliver precise results for your business needs. Commodity workstation hardware is enhanced with aiDAPTIV+ software, and first generation aiDAPTIVCache Series ai100 SSDs to enable larger training models than previously possible in a workstation form-factor.

From the cloud, to the edge, to the enterprise, data center architects are deploying higher levels of flash to unlock the potential of AI, object storage, file sharing and more. At the same time, they are laser-focused on controlling spend and must find solutions to help them manage, scale and utilize storage assets more efficiently. This is driving a growing trend to disaggregate and share NVMe flash over fabric (NVMe-oF) for improved performance, availability and flexibility of storage resources.

Helping customers simplify NVMe/NVMe-oF storage deployment, Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced its enhanced OpenFlex Data24 3200 NVMe-oF JBOF/Storage Platform along with the next-generation RapidFlex A2000 and C2000 NVMe-oF fabric bridge devices (FBDs), and the new Ultrastar DC SN655 PCIe Gen 4.0 dual-port NVMe SSD. These new storage solutions are enabling an ecosystem, providing more flexibility and choice for simplifying NVMe and NVMe-oF deployment for customers. Western Digital is now the only company with vertical integration capabilities targeting both ends of the Ethernet wire to deliver solutions where data travels from the server initiator to the storage target.

Introducing the CP132 - a PCIe 5.0 NVMe Sneakernet Solution specifically designed for large digital file transport and offline data backup, fitting any standard 5.25" optical drive bay of a computer case or rackmount. The CP132 enables businesses and professionals to physically transfer data with up to 4x U.2/U.3 NVMe SSD capacity at a whopping 128 Gbps transfer rate from one system or workstation to another. The CP132 is ideal for large-scale data backup or transfer in enterprises or video production studios, data transport between remote areas lacking network connectivity, or data migration between large data centers and clients.

The CP132 features a heavy-duty, fully-enclosed removable drive caddy that allows users to remove/install 4x U.2/U.3 NVMe SSDs together for physically transporting large amounts of data between systems. To remove the drive caddy, simply rotate the center thumb screw to release the retractable mechanical handle and pull the handle to remove the drive caddy from the system. To reinstall the drive caddy quickly, just reverse the previous steps. The rugged, all-metal enclosed drive caddy securely protects the installed U.2/U.3 SSDs, preventing damage to the valuable SSDs and data during transportation.

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced the release of two SSDs, the Micron 6500 ION NVMe SSD and the Micron XTR NVMe SSD. Designed to keep pace with the accelerating growth of data, these drives provide a major advancement for data centers by lowering operating costs and improving storage efficiency. The Micron 6500 ION is a high-capacity SSD that offers a superior value over competitive QLC-based drives by providing best-in-class performance and enabling a more environmentally sustainable data center. The 6500 ION is able to deliver TLC performance and QLC-like cost due to Micron's 232-layer technology node leadership compared to the competition's use of sub-200-layer QLC technology. When paired with Micron 6500 ION drives or other SSDs, the Micron XTR SSD delivers extreme endurance that enhances system performance.

"Customers are looking for new capabilities to address the data growth and performance needs of artificial intelligence data lakes and other demanding workloads. As a result, we are seeing tremendous traction on the 6500 ION and XTR with customers who are deploying storage at scale due to their unrivaled combination of large capacity, superior performance, and amazing endurance," said Alvaro Toledo, vice president and general manager of Micron's Data Center Storage group. "The 6500 ION SSD offers QLC value with TLC performance and up to a 20% reduction in power consumption versus competing QLC SSDs, allowing our customers to reduce their carbon footprint. Together, these SSDs enable customers to leap ahead and harness the power of artificial intelligence without compromising performance."

Micron Technology, today announced the Micron 9400 NVMe SSD is in volume production and immediately available from channel partners and to global OEM customers for use in servers requiring the highest levels of storage performance. The Micron 9400 is designed to manage the most demanding data center workloads, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI) training, machine learning (ML) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. The drive delivers an industry-leading 30.72 terabytes (TB) of storage capacity, superior workload performance versus the competition, and 77% improved input/output operations per second (IOPS). The Micron 9400 is the world's fastest PCIe Gen4 data center U.3 drive shipping and delivers consistently low latency at all capacity points.

"High performance, capacity and low latency are critical features for enterprises seeking to maximize their investments in AI/ML and supercomputing systems," said Alvaro Toledo, vice president and general manager of data center storage at Micron. "Thanks to its industry-leading 30 TB capacity and stunning performance with over 1 million IOPS in mixed workloads, the Micron 9400 SSD packs larger datasets into each server and accelerates machine learning training, which equips users to squeeze more out of their GPUs."

Today, Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX), a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions, announced two additions to its Nytro portfolio, the Nytro 5550 SSD and Nytro 5350 SSD. Engineered with Phison technology for high performance, efficiency, and increased storage density in data centers, the new products comprise the Seagate Nytro 5050 NVMe SSD series. Designed to offer more computing with less energy consumption, they provide a cost-effective solution that eliminates bottlenecks, improves quality of service (QoS), and delivers the highest levels of data integrity and security for business applications.

The Nytro 5350 PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD doubles the read throughput of the latest SAS SSDs, achieving over ten times the bandwidth of SATA to significantly improve QoS. Designed to give data centers more computing power while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO), the drive removes data bottlenecks with blistering up to 7.4 GB/s bandwidth and up to 195K IOPS random write speeds and up to 1.7M IOPS random read speeds to provide consistent response times. Perfectly tuned to increase density and boost capacity in ultra-dense environments, Nytro 5350 brings up to 15.36 TB in a 15 mm form factor and up to 7.68 TB in a 7 mm form factor with dual ports, supporting both U.2 and U.3 interfaces for active-active high availability. Designed to take on enterprise workloads, Nytro 5350 delivers 1 DWPD at 2.5M MTBF for enhanced endurance.

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced that its CM7 Series enterprise NVMe SSDs are now shipping to select customers. Optimized for the needs of high-performance, highly efficient servers and storage, the CM7 family is designed with PCIe 5.0 technology in Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E3.S and 2.5-inch form factors

Having introduced the industry's first EDSFF drives designed with PCIe 5.0 technology last year, the addition of the CM7 family expands KIOXIA's leadership position and allows OEM customers to deliver best-in-class performance to end users: The CM7 Series nearly saturates the PCIe 5.0 interface at 14 gigabytes/s read throughput.

Teledyne LeCroy, the worldwide leader in protocol test and measurement solutions, announces availability of validation test appliances for PCIe Gen5 based Solid State Drives. The OakGate R300 3U rackmount test appliance and the OakGate DE200 desktop test appliance offer scalable validation and conformance testing of the latest generation of solid-state drives (SSDs).

To support demand for faster, more efficient SSDs, SSD manufacturers are taking advantage of the 5th generation of PCI Express (PCIe), which doubles throughput with data transfer rates of up to 32GT/s. SSD quality and reliability needs to be high, but demand is also high. So, it is also critical that the manufacturing process is not slowed unnecessarily for testing. The OakGate R300 and the OakGate DE200 test appliances provide design and test engineers the means to test the performance and specification compliance of these PCIe Gen5 quickly and efficiently based SSDs. The new modular 8-Bay system provides customers the flexibility to easily interchange all popular SSD connector types and form factors. The new 16-Bay Expansion Enclosures enables the creation of large test configurations, reducing test time.

HighPoint M.2 HPC Series RAID Controllers establish a new benchmark for NVMe performance: up to 55,000 MB/s for a single RAID array. HighPoint manufactures the industry's most comprehensive selection of M.2, U.2 and U.3 NVMe RAID controllers. The 8-Port SSD7540 and SSD7140A represent the best M.2 solutions available in today's marketplace. HighPoint 8-Port High-Port-Count (HPC) M.2 controllers deliver unbeatable performance and storage capacity in a compact PCIe device that can be easily integrated into any industry standard computing platform. Our SSD7540 PCIe Gen4 x16 controller can support up to 64 TB of storage at speeds up to 28,000 MB/s. Dual-Card Cross-Sync configurations can double performance and capacity thresholds - up to 120+TB at an astonishing 55,000 MB/s.

HighPoint's unique performance-focused NVMe architecture utilizes intelligent switch technology to allocate up to x4 lanes of bandwidth to each NVMe device port. This enables our 8-port controllers to fully saturate x16 lanes of host bandwidth using as little as four NVMe SSDs. However, additional SSDs can be added to maximize storage capacity, or fine tune the configuration for a specific application by optimizing a RAID array for sequential or random I/O.

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced that its CM6 and CD6 Series of PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs have earned VMware vSAN 7.0 certification, enabling them to be shared across connected hosts in a VMware vSphere cluster. Users can pool KIOXIA SSDs together in a single, distributed, shared data-store and define the storage capabilities required (such as performance, capacity and availability) for each connected virtual machine within the VMware vSAN cluster. These capabilities not only further hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) options in virtual environments, but also ensure that storage policies are administered and maintained within the CM6 and CD6 Series with vSAN compatibility.

This certification allows VMware vSAN support for both hybrid and all-flash configurations using a two-tier storage architecture, capacity tier and cache. All write operations are sent to the cache tier and are subsequently de-staged to the capacity tier over time. When a CM6 or CD6 Series SSD is deployed within a hybrid configuration, its cache tier is used as both a read and write cache, staging hot data to improve system performance. In an all-flash configuration, 100 percent of the cache tier is used for the write buffer. Given the benefits of tiered storage, CM6 and CD6 SSDs are capable of meeting the demanding requirements of both enterprise and data center customers.

Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash controller integrated circuits and storage solutions, today announced its technology development of PCIe Gen 5 customizable SSD solutions for Enterprise and Client SSDs. Phison customers from Hyperscale Cloud Data Centers to PC Gaming demand the fastest performance motherboards and SSD storage devices. Their business models require that they transition to the newest technologies when they first become available, usually well before the rest of the software and hardware ecosystem has been established.

Phison is enabling our valued customers with PCIe Gen 5 SSD platforms that may be customized to perform optimally in their applications. Customers who are early adopters of PCIe Gen 5 SSDs will benefit from superior specifications and first to market leadership revenue. The data rate specification for PCIe Gen 5 at 32 Gb/s is twice the lane speed of PCIe Gen 4 at 16 Gb/s, enabling either double the overall performance, or offering similar performance, but using half as many lanes as PCIe Gen 4.

KIOXIA America Inc, is the first supplier to launch PCIe Gen4 NVM Express (NVMe ) data center-class solid-state drives (SSDs) within the HPE NVMe mainstream performance SSD portfolio available on HPE ProLiant, HPE Synergy and HPE Apollo servers. KIOXIA offers the industry's broadest SSD product portfolio and has been collaborating with HPE to create best-in-class flash-based storage solutions for years. Today, the company announced that its CD6 Series of PCIe Gen4 NVMe U.3 SSDs now enables HPE customers to upgrade from SATA to NVMe performance at an affordable price point.

The PCI Express 4.0 specification was designed to double the performance of server and storage systems, pushing speeds up to 16.0 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) or 2 gigabits per second (Gb/s) throughput per lane, and driving new performance levels for cloud and enterprise applications. Today, KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.) announced that its lineup of CM6 and CD6 Series PCIe 4.0 NVM Express (NVMe ) enterprise and data center solid state drives (SSDs) are now shipping to customers.

An established leader in developing PCIe and NVMe SSDs, KIOXIA delivers never-before-seen performance. KIOXIA was the first company to publicly demonstrate PCIe 4.0 SSDs and is now the first to ship these next-generation drives. The CM6 and CD6 Series SSDs are compliant to the latest NVMe specification, and include key features such as in-band NVMe-MI, persistent event log, namespace granularity, and shared stream writes. Additionally, both drives are SFF-TA-1001 conformant (also known as U.3), which allows them to be used in tri-mode enabled backplanes, which can accept SAS, SATA or NVMe SSDs.