AI servers are getting faster, and they're getting hotter, and Kioxia believes storage needs to evolve with them.
The company he said the new KIOXIA NX1 series, the E1.S PCIe 5.0 NVMe “family” for data centers designed for AI servers and hyperscale environments. The drives are notable not only for their performance, but also because they are the first SSDs from Kioxia to support direct liquid cooling.
This cooling support could become very important as data center operators cram more GPUs, processors, and storage into compact server “packages.” Air cooling is sometimes not enough for all the elements in the rack, which generate significant heat.
The NX1 series will be available in 9,5mm and 15mm E1.S form factors. The slimmer 9,5mm model supports both air cooling and direct liquid cooling, while the 15mm version uses air cooling only.
For direct liquid cooling, the SSD uses a cold plate that removes heat from the drive. This doesn't mean that liquid flows through the SSD, of course, but it allows the drive to become part of a larger liquid-cooled server design.
Kioxia says the NX1 series is aimed at GPU-enabled servers, cloud providers, and hyperscale data centers. These are environments where storage performance can become a bottleneck if it doesn't keep up with the processors that are producing/consuming the data.
Compared to the previous KIOXIA XD8 series, the company claims that the NX1 drives can offer up to approximately 38% higher sequential write performance and up to approximately 20% higher random write performance.
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
