IOPS-Optimized SSDs

Overview

IOPS-optimized SSDs are a proposed new class of SSD designed for fine-grained IOPS-per-dollar (and IOPS-per-TCO) rather than the legacy capacity-per-dollar optimization. Legacy storage architectures are great for optimizing capacity per dollar, but emerging fine-grained, data-dependent sparse scatter-gather workloads — vector databases and graph networks — need a new SKU/architecture designed for fine-grained IOPS per dollar. A core hardware limitation is NAND page size: current NAND uses large pages, so fetching 512 bytes out of a 32K page wastes 63/64 of the data read; a new NAND approach is needed so sparse, fine-grained accesses do not throw away most of the page. These drives are the target of the OCP Storage Next standardization effort.