At the 2025 Open Compute Platform, OCP Summit Meta spoke about their experience with quad level cell, QLC, NAND flash in their data centers. A panel talked about developments in the new E2 SSD form factor and another panel discussed flexible data placement.
Kioxia was showing their latest enterprise and data center SSDs. Samsung spoke about their HBM and other memory advances and SK hynix talked about their high bandwidth flash and other memory products for AI.
Meta gave information about their first QLC Flash Storage Server, the Open Rack Frame version 3, ORv3, whose specifications are shown below. The actual shelf reference design, supporting 24 U.2 and U.2 long Direct Flash Modules was created by their design partner, Jabil. As shown the goal was a storage server that would enable more than 50PB per rack.
A panel with Peter Choi from Pure Storage, Ross Stenfort from Meta, Arthur Lai from Molex and Anthony Constantine from Micron spoke about updates on SSD form factors. Their talk shared experiences designing and shipping QLC drives and contributions to a new industry standard form factor, E2. This standard is designed to support 64 NAND packages with a large flash controller, high DRAM memory on a single circuit board operating at 30+W with low airflow.
Peter from Pure Storage compared the U.2 long Direct Flash Modules they make with the E2 form factor. Ross from Meta positioned such QLC flash modules as a layer in the memory and storage hierarchy below TLC SSDs and above HDDs. The goal from 2024 was that this E2 form factor would be the industry standard for 128TB or higher SSDs. The slide below shows how the consortium wanted to leverage E3 and E1 form factors to create this new standard.
Arthur Lai from Molex went into details about the optimal design of storage modules for optimal air cooling, which favored what he called an ortho hybrid solution for high density rack installation. Challenges remain to push the performance to that required for Gen 7 with over 80W support.
Anthony Constatine from Micron discussed E2 improvements made since 2024 and future improvements and liquid cooling. He pointed out the need to have one form factor to support high density data center applications for PCIe 7.
Another session covered flexible data placement, FDP, and how it might best be used to avoid write application, WAF, that can cause early wear out of QLC and TLC SSDs. Rory Bolt from Kioxia spoke about FDP use cases. He made recommendations that separating temporary files and swap spaces from data with a longer lifespan we could reduce the write amplification.
Kioxia was exhibiting their LC9 Series Enterprise QLC SSDs as well as their SD8 E1.S Data Center SSDs and their CD9P Series Data Center SSDs. The LC9 products from the Kioxia booth are shown below.
Taeksang Song from Samsung spoke about advances in HBM4 and HBM4E as shown below, showing over 2X bandwidth increases over HBM3E and significantly greater energy efficiency. The company also said that the future of HBM will involve customization for various types of AI demands.
He also spoke about advances in DDR5 memory, RDIMM and MRDIMM as well as LPDDR6, LPCAMM2 and SOCAMM2. He also talked about a process in memory, PIM, device with LPDDR for AI, LPDDR5X-PIM. The figure below shows the expected performance and energy improvement this PIM can provide.
He discussed Samsung’s CXL solutions, shown below, which will enable greater memory utilization through memory pooling and compute near memory.
C. S. Kim from SK hynix spoke about the company’s AIN family for AI applications shown below.
This includes high bandwidth flash, which SK hynix announced it was working in partnership with SanDisk on at the 2025 FMS. The slide below indicates that unlike conventional SSDs, this highly parallel memory configuration lets NAND-based flash devices operate at near HBM performance with memory capacities like those of SSDs.
The 2025 OCP Summit featured Meta and SSD companies developments on the E2 form factor, memory and SSDs for AI from Samsung and Kioxia as well as high bandwidth flash developments from SK hynix.
