?Kazan Networks will be demonstrating the world’s first 2.5” NVMe over Fabrics (NVMf)-connected Solid State Drive (SSD) at this week’s Flash Memory Summit. Fresh off the announcement of their Series A funding round, and just two months after the NVMf standard was released, this prototype shows the level of integration possible with the Kazan Networks’ cutting edge solution.
“Connecting individual SSDs via high-performance, low-latency Ethernet in a standard way demonstrates the efficiency of our architecture,” said Joe Steinmetz, CEO of Kazan Networks. “Our highly-accelerated, state machine-based implementation represents the optimum combination of performance, flexibility, low power, and real estate efficiency.”
Kazan Networks has been shipping implementations of their architecture since March of this year, but today’s SSD prototype represents an even smaller form factor, fitting into a standard 2.5” drive package (100mm x 70mm x 15mm). Inside that package is a custom Xilinx FPGA containing Kazan Networks’ hardware and software plus two M.2-class SSDs for storage.
"Kazan has been able to demonstrate impressive performance and features with our line of Kintex Ultrascale FPGAs," said Arun Iyengar, VP of Global Markets at Xilinx. "The implementation of a new standard Data Center protocol, like NVMe over Fabrics, is an ideal example of where FPGAs are used for performance and time-to-market advantages."
“By leveraging the connectivity and scalability of Ethernet, it opens up tremendous possibilities in terms of datacenter architecture,” Joe continued. “For example, we could easily show this drive operating on the other side of the exhibit hall from our server, something absolutely impossible when connecting to SSDs via PCIe.”
