Viking Employs PCIe 4.0 to Bring NVMe Storage to New Heights

What do you get when you combine the recent PCIe 4.0 standard with NVMe? Faster performance and higher availability, for starters.

Viking Enterprise Solutions this week introduced an NVME (non-volatile memory express) storage solution that does just that. The NSS2249, built using AMD processors that support the faster PCIe 4.0 interface, delivers 80 GB/s for reads, 60 GB/s for writes and 3 million IOPS in a single 2RU system.

Each AMD chip supports 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes per CPU. The architecture takes advantage of the 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes from AMD EPYC’s CPU to directly connect 24 drives.

According to the company, the solution improves pipeline throughput by reducing I/O bottlenecks in high-performance applications like edge computing storage, analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, OLTP transactional databases, modeling and simulation.

The NSS2249 is one of the first products available using NVMe running on PCIe 4.0, said Tom Coughlin, president of Coughlin Associates. It's also a change in Viking's processor technology from the typical Intel CPUs it uses.

"PCIe 4.0 has twice the transition/second rate of PCIe 3.0," Coughlin said. "This will probably translate to a 40% or more overall data rate improvement with SSDs designed to support PCIe 4.0."

PCIe 4.0, which came to the market earlier this year, is the fourth generation of the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) motherboard interface. It is being incorporated into everything from hard drives to WiFi, Ethernet cards and graphics cards, as well as solid-state drives.

One unit of Viking's NSS2249 houses 24 of the NVMe PCIe 4.0 drives and can support up to two CPU server modules. This would represent a performance increase of up to 200% compared with PCIe v3.0 NVMe drive-based platforms, the company said.