ScaleFlux Claims Flash Storage <1¢/Gigabyte/ Year with Micron QLC

SAN JOSE – May 26, 2021 – ScaleFlux, Inc., maker of computational storage at scale, today announced it has expanded its Computational Storage Drive (CSD) portfolio to include quad-level cell (QLC) NAND Flash storage from Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU). These new QLC drives — with integrated compression — are designed to improve the affordability of Flash storage, reducing costs to less than $0.01 per gigabyte per year.

Rapidly-growing Flash storage capacity stretches IT budgets, and QLC is designed to deliver on average 15-20 percent lower price than its triple-level cell (TLC) equivalent. However, the tradeoffs when it comes to cost, performance, and endurance have limited the overall adoption of QLC in the data center and enterprise markets.

By adding Micron QLC to the Data Scale Edition of ScaleFlux’s CSD product line, ScaleFlux is eliminating the performance and endurance tradeoffs, enabling customers to adopt QLC and approach HDD levels of cost per gigabyte. Customers now receive more value from their storage dollars — whether leveraging lower-cost QLC instead of TLC for their growing Flash storage footprint, or utilizing QLC as a massively faster tier of warm storage at near-HDD costs.

“Bringing the value of Computational Storage to QLC will significantly improve the affordability of scaling Flash deployments,” said Hao Zhong, Co-founder and CEO of ScaleFlux. “We are solving the performance and endurance challenges that ordinary QLC drives encounter while expanding the cost savings. It’s a win-win for customers with growing needs for storage that can keep up with today’s data-driven businesses.”

Key benefits of ScaleFlux Data Scale Edition CSD with Micron QLC include:

  • Performance on par with more expensive TLC drives, and up to 6x faster than NVMe QLC SSDs
  • Endurance on par with more expensive TLC drives and up to 4x greater than other QLC SSDs.
  • Orders of magnitude better performance at near the price of Enterprise HDDs
  • Transparent compression/decompression
  • Extendable capacity for increased cost savings

“We’ve collaborated with ScaleFlux to deliver the enhanced value of QLC NAND to customers,” said Dan Doyle, Director of NAND Component Marketing at Micron. “ScaleFlux CSD with Micron’s industry-leading QLC NAND empowers data center customers to quickly and affordably turn data into intelligence.”

Micron N28A QLC NAND is available as part of ScaleFlux’s CSD portfolio today.