Microsoft takes to the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit 2018 to announce Project Denali-- a specification to standardised SSD firmware interfaces when used in large-scale datacentres.
As the company puts it, "Project Denali drives provide the flexibility needed to optimise for the workloads of a wide variety of cloud applications, the simplicity to keep pace with rapid innovations in NAND flash memory and application design, and the scale required for multitenant hardware that is so common in the cloud."
Co-developed with CNEX Labs and supporting partners including Marvell, Broadcom, Intel, LiteOn, Samsung and SK Hynix, Denali splits the components making an SSD in 2 modules. The drives deals with bad blocks, media and power failures to present clean memory blocks, while an optimised software interface handles tasks like garbage collection and wear leveling, as based on the applications they run on. The result, Microsoft says, should reduce SSD deployment costs and allow accelerated development of both datacentre hardware and software.
So far Denali has been seen in prototype form, but the hardware specification is to be finalised in the coming months before general availability later this year.
Go Project Denali to Define Flexible SSDs for Cloud-Scale Applications
