Zoned Storage

Higher Capacities, Lower TCO & Improved QoS

The Increasing demand for data center storage capacities

Data volumes created by enterprises, machines, and consumer-generated content continue to drive demand for data center storage capacities at petabyte, exabyte and even zettabyte scale. Today, large scale data infrastructure already uses tens of thousands of SSDs and HDDs. Managing the extreme scale of data in a cost-effective manner is quickly becoming a requirement.

Benefits of Zoned Storage for the Datacenter

Zoned Storage is an open source, standards-based initiative to enable data centers to scale efficiently for the zettabyte storage capacity era. There are two technologies behind Zoned Storage, Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) in HDDs and Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) in SSDs.

Zoned storage devices, such as ZNS SSDs are divided into zones, significantly simplifying the drive architecture and minimizing the need for complex data management. With a unified software stack, the host is able to intelligently place data in different zones which enables these key benefits:

Increased Capacities

Higher density and scale as virtually no over-provisioning is required

Reduced Cost

Significantly reduced DRAM requirements and fewer support logic functions are required

Improved QoS