Zoned Storage Initiative aims for Zettabyte Scale data centers

A new Zoned Storage Initiative backed by Western Digital is aiming to achieve greater economies of scale for data center storage as we approach the zettabyte-scale era.

The Zoned Storage architecture enables applications, host and storage to orchestrate data placement and take full advantage of the highest available storage capacities typically with shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs and the emerging zoned namespaces (ZNS) standard for NVMe SSDs to deliver better endurance and predictable, low-latency QoS performance. A planned extension of the NVMe standard, ZNS complements SMR technology, enabling developers to take advantage of both SMR and ZNS under a single storage stack, regardless of media type. With 50 percent of Western Digital’s HDD exabyte shipments expected to be on SMR by 2023, customers will be able to leverage their SMR application development to encompass high-capacity ZNS SSDs. Delivering intelligence to application architectures, SMR and ZNS will be key foundational building blocks of the new zettabyte-scale era now and into the future.

Western Digital is also announcing its ZNS development SSD for early Zoned Storage efforts. ZNS NVMe SSDs offer several benefits over traditional NVMe SSDs. Conforming to the ZNS feature set, as defined and governed by NVM Express, Inc., these ZNS SSDs are designed to lower write amplification, increase capacity, and provide improved throughput and latency. ZNS SSDs achieve these improvements by aligning “zones” to the internal physical properties of the SSDs, eliminating inefficiencies in the placement of data.

“If you think about the digital universe and how much content will be generated – from healthcare to autonomous cars to digital marketplaces and smart cities – we’re just scratching the surface of zettabyte-scale,” said Martin Fink, CTO, Western Digital. “With this data deluge, data centers architects can’t simply solve problems in the same way using general-purpose IT. The Zoned Storage initiative, along with our innovations in Flash and SMR – including our 20TB on nine-disks – gives customers the tools and resources needed to architect and intelligently optimize workloads for generations to come. Through our understanding of software stacks, and proven contributions to initiatives and standards committees such as RISC-V and NVMe/NVMe-oF, we look forward to sharing that knowledge with the open-source community to help drive support and adoption of ZNS and SMR.”