Samsung Electronics has introduced a new enterprise solid-state drive (SSD) featuring Zoned Namespace (ZNS) technology, the ,PM1731a, that will maximize available user capacity and offer longer lifespan in storage server, data center and cloud environments.
Built upon Samsung’s sixth-generation V-NAND, the 2.5-inch PM1731a will come in two terabyte (TB) and four TB models. The SSD will feature dual ports, ensuring the drive is fully accessible for continuous operations and minimizing downtime. This is essential for enterprises and public cloud companies that cannot afford any pause in the continuity of their businesses.
The improved SSDs will enable enterprise customers to handle big data and artificial intelligence applications with much greater efficiency, Samsung said in a press statement.
- Samsung begins mass-production of power-efficient SSD for data centres
- SSD vs HDD: which is best for your needs?
Samsung betting big on ZNS tech
Samsung, which is hoping to expand the ZNS ecosystem, will make it available to xNVMe that provides software libraries and tools to improve the performance of NVMe devices. Samsung said it is also participating in the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) community created by Intel, enabling SPDK users to implement ZNS more easily.
ZNS technology keeps data in groups based on their usage and access frequency, and stores them sequentially in independent zones within an SSD. So, ZNS SSDs can significantly reduce the amount of data rearrangement operations.
“This will make the drive last up to four times longer than conventional NVMe SSDs, making it a greener, more sustainable solution for server infrastructure,” the company claimed.
ZNS also allows users to take advantage of the SSD’s full capacity by eliminating the need for overprovisioning, which would have required reserving some storage space for background tasks, it added.
Samsung is hoping to mass-produce its ZNS SSDs in the second half of the year.
