SAMSUNG

Company Unveiled First Storage Prototype Based On Next-Generation Intel Xeon Hardware Platform – Sapphire Rapids

South Korean giant Samsung has unveiled the first storage prototype based on the next-generation Intel Xeon hardware platform – Sapphire Rapids. The device was demonstrated as part of the OCP Global Summit 2021, which is dedicated to open source software and hardware projects for data centers. The novelty was developed in collaboration with Inspur and Naver Cloud.

Poseidon V2 has two Sapphire Rapids processors, 32 DDR5 slots and can accommodate up to 24 E3.S 1T devices (unlike the E1 in Poseidon V1), but the cage is compatible with the E3.S 2T as well. Strictly speaking, this system is not a repository in the traditional sense of the word. Yes, it is suitable for NVMe SSDs with PCIe 5.0 interface (like PM1743) – regular NAND and SCM like Z-SSD, XL-Flash or Intel Optane – and offers fast implementation of NVMe-oF, including NVMe / TCP.

For a 200 GbE connection to the system, Samsung has already managed to achieve sequential read and write speeds of 24.5 and 18.6 GB / s, and for random – 19.4 and 8.7 GB / s, respectively. However, in the E3.S format, SmartSSDs with the possibility of data auto-processing will also be produced, in addition to several DRAM accelerators and expanders. The latter is possible thanks to the support of Compute Express Link (CXL).

However, having hardware support is half the battle. Therefore, Samsung is developing its proprietary Poseidon Storage operating system. The operating system will be responsible for volume management, software RAID formation, performance monitoring and profiling, and so on. In addition, it will provide high availability (2 nodes), multipath connectivity and take into account non-uniform memory access (NUMA). Open APIs will be available to developers.

Mass production of the Poseidon V2 is scheduled to start in the third quarter of 2022, and in the fourth quarter Samsung plans to transfer all project developments to OCP. Strictly speaking, most of the novelty components have already been made to OCP standards, so this process is unlikely to be delayed.

AVnews