Travel IT biz reportedly testing 100TB SSDs

I need to take a cold shower

Global travel systems business Amadeus is testing 100TB SSDs.

Paul Hubert, from the CTO office in Amadeus, revealed the news at a Micron SolidScale launch event in London yesterday. He did not say Amadeus was evaluating Micron's SoldScale all-flash NVMe array, but presented a set of flash system requirements that matched SolidScale closely.

Hubert said Amadeus was using 16TB SSDs currently, has 32TB ones in prospect, and was evaluating two 100TB drives.

A source close to this revealed they were quad-level cell (4bits/cell) or QLC SSDs, possibly from Toshiba, that have a third more capacity per cell than today's TLC (3 bits/cell) SSDs.

Assume a 1U x 24 drive form factor and we have 2,400TB in 2U, 2.4 petabytes. Stick 40 of these in a rack and we have 96PB.

This is raw capacity. Apply compression, say a 2:1 ratio, and we get 192PB; the capacity numbers become ridiculously high. Six of these gets us past an exabyte. Apply NVMe over Fabrics networking and network access becomes near enough as fast as to a locally attached NVMe SSD.

With the largest available disk drive holding 12TB today then low-latency access, high-capacity application needs will best be met by SSDs and not spinning disk – if customers can afford it.

Imagine what this means for products such as Micron's SolidScale, Pure's FlashBlade and the Isilon all-flash filer. Block and file-based data in exabyte-capacities accessed in microseconds. Realtime Big Data analytics, HPC and other applications, held back by their inability to access large enough datasets fast enough, will be revolutionised. ®