One NVMe drive is a lot of fun, but what happens if you put 40 of them into a single system. Kingston is showing that at CES 2018 with an ultra-high performance 1U server.
40 NVMe Drives in a Single 1U Server
When you take 40 NVMe drives and want to hook them up to a single server, you’ll need something extra. That is handled by standard drive-sized adapters which each hold four drives. These are then connected to any standard server via U.2 connectors. The result, an incredible performance.
The 1U server used (SB122A-PH) has 10 drive bays which make up the total of 40 M.2 drives. The drives utilised are the DCU1000 according to the display, but the drive on show has KC1000 inserted. The rest of the system is composed of a dual Xeon E5-2660 setup and 128GB 2400MHz memory.
Extreme Performance
I’ve teased extreme performance and now it is time to talk actual numbers. The setup is able to deliver an incredible 30GB/s at sequential read operations and 27GB/s at writes. The random performance is at least as nice with 7 million IOPS when reading and 6.6 million when writing. Now those are some proper speeds! Even more so when we consider the size. After all, this comes from a 1U server.
Don’t Try This at Home
This kind of setup is naturally not intended for use at home, that’s a given. The 40 NVMe drives alone would break most of our budgets. On top of that comes all the rest of the hardware. But that isn’t what this setup is intended for anyway. It is a high-performance storage server for enterprises. A server to be used where every bit of performance matters. The 800GB per drive should also offer a decent amount of storage, no matter the drive configuration. That said, I’d sure love to have it as a SAN.
