Samsung developed an SSD that works independently without a CPU

At the recent OCP Global Summit, Samsung revealed more information about a new type of SSD it is developing - the product line is almost exclusively for data centers.

When it comes to flash memory, the most common configuration in data centers around the world is JBOF (Just-a-Bunch-Of-Flash), which uses NVMe SSD storage attached to PCIe switches, microprocessor and NIC (network card). There are two quite important issues with this system, related to the lack of scalability of storage controllers and bandwidth constraints; A typical case of having too many intermediaries.

EBOF - or Ethernet Bunch of Flash, as Samsung put it - aims to solve this problem by placing Ethernet ports (usually 2 to allow redundant) on the SSD itself.

However, these are not the usual Ethernet ports you know, because each port supports speeds of up to 25Gbps - about 25 times that of most common 1 Gigabit Ethernet ports. Unsurprisingly, it's only available in standard SSD (2.5-inch) sizes, instead of smaller sizes like the M2.

Samsung claims the E-SSD will achieve PCIe Gen4x4 performance, or about 1500K IOPS at 4K random read speeds. What is even more miraculous, however, is the performance of the drives in almost linear proportions.

Based on the chart provided by the company, 24 NVMe drives will be about 7.5 times faster than one NVMe drive, while the same number of NVMe-oF SSDs (NVMe over Fabrics) will be about 23 times faster than one CD driver.

Eliminating CPU, network connection type and other bottlenecks means lower latency, higher bandwidth, lower costs, better performance and large TCO savings. Great news for data center operators, cloud service providers.