Toshiba and Newisys Deliver HPC Storage with NVMe-oF at SuperComputing 2017

Companies Team up to Demonstrate NVMe™ Performance and Ultimate Storage Flexibility for HPC Workloads

DENVER, Colo. and SAN JOSE, Calif. — November 8, 2017 — Toshiba Memory America, Inc. (TMA), the US-based subsidiary of Toshiba Memory Corporation, and Newisys, a Sanmina Corporation product division, will be demonstrating an HPC (High Performance Computing) NVMe-oF™ (NVM Express® over Fabrics)1 solution at next week’s SuperComputing SC17 Conference.

NVMe-oF brings direct-connect NVMe SSD performance to the storage fabric with the flexibility of disaggregated storage. It provides scale-out, cloud data centers with software-defined, NVMe-oF storage that centralizes and virtualizes NVMe SSDs across the network, making them highly available to compute nodes at near direct-attached storage (DAS) performance.

The demonstration features Newisys’ next-generation NVMe-oF hardware platform, the NSS1160G-2N, an evolution of their recent, award-winning NVMe-oF storage system design. It is a 1U storage system with dual-node and dual-socket Intel® Xeon®2 processors and supports up to 4x 100Gb/s Ethernet network interface cards (NICs). Each node has eight (8) Toshiba NVMe U.2 SSDs3 (16 NVMe drives per system) directly connected to the CPU, minimizing latency.

Toshiba is making the demo possible with its target engine software to provide storage virtualization and SSD/flash management, which is critical to fully realize the promise of NVMe-oF connectivity. With an NVMe-oF standardized protocol, Toshiba’s storage node software delivers the full performance of NVMe SSDs to compute nodes for HPC dataset load and unload times by delivering the bandwidth of direct-attached NVMe SSDs with inherent network efficiencies. 

Other key features of Toshiba’s NVMe target engine are:

  • Abstraction, total virtualization and high availability of NVMe-based flash storage
  • Provisioning of storage and namespaces to compute nodes and virtual machines
  • REST API (application programming interface) to connect to popular orchestration frameworks

“NVMe-oF enables new levels of storage performance and flexibility for HPC and cloud data centers,” said Steve Fingerhut, senior vice president and general manager, SSD and Cloud Software Business Units at Toshiba Memory America, Inc. “Toshiba’s software provides a critical building block for data centers to realize the potential of NVMe-oF. Our software delivers an NVMe target engine that enables compute nodes to efficiently use the very high performance and storage capacities of NVMe SSDs.”  

“Sanmina customers rely on us to deliver innovation to them,” said Eugene McCabe, EVP Enterprise Computing & Storage at Sanmina Corporation. “Our collaboration with Toshiba demonstrates our commitment to innovation by proving new technologies, like NVMe-oF, in a real-world application environment.”

The 2017 SuperComputing Exhibition will take place in Denver, Colorado in the Colorado Convention Center on November 13-16. The demonstration will be showcased in the Sanmina booth (#237). 

About Toshiba Memory America, Inc.
Toshiba Memory America, Inc. (TMA) is the US-based subsidiary of Toshiba Memory Corporation, a leading worldwide supplier of flash memory and solid state drives (SSDs). From the invention of flash memory to today’s breakthrough 96-layer BiCS FLASH™ 3D technology, Toshiba continues to lead innovation and move the industry forward. For more information on TMA, please visit www.toshiba.com/TMA and follow the company on Facebook and on Twitter: @ToshibaStorage and @Toshiba_Memory.    

About Newisys
Newisys, a product division of Sanmina Corporation, provides advanced data center products including solid-state memory and disk-based storage server appliances, JBOD storage systems and other products for a variety of data center and storage applications. Newisys solutions are tailored for integration into OEM, System Integrator and Data Center products, reducing development and operating costs while improving time-to-market. More information is available at http://www.newisys.com.

About Sanmina Corporation
Sanmina Corporation is a leading integrated manufacturing solutions provider serving the fastest growing segments of the global Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) market. Recognized as a technology leader, Sanmina provides end-to-end manufacturing solutions, delivering superior quality and support to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) primarily in the communications networks, storage, industrial, defense, medical, energy, and industries that include embedded computing technologies, such as point of sale devices, casino gaming and automotive. Sanmina has facilities strategically located in key regions throughout the world. More information about the Company is available at www.sanmina.com.

1 NVM Express is a registered trademark, and NVMe-oF and NVMe are trademarks of NVM Express, Inc.
2 Intel and Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries.
3 Toshiba SSDs were used for this demo, but the Toshiba NVMe-oF storage node software supports non-Toshiba NVMe SSDs as well.

  • Information in this press release, including product pricing and specifications, content of services, and contact information is current and believed to be accurate on the date of the announcement, but is subject to change without prior notice. Technical and application information contained here is subject to the most recent applicable Toshiba product specifications.