The hyperscale cloud innovates through relentless optimization. Cloud providers are always looking for ways to maximize the efficiency of every hardware and software component they deploy. To help them achieve that goal, KIOXIA released the open source Software-Enabled Flash™ API, which redefines the relationship between the host and flash devices, and allows cloud-scale users to unlock the most value from their flash.

Software-Enabled Flash™ technology is being developed to allow storage developers to maximize the value of flash deployed in their data centers. It makes flash storage software-defined by redefining the relationship between the host and solid-state storage. Purpose-built, media-centric hardware focused on cloud-scale requirements, combined with an open source API and SDK, give developers tools to define latency outcomes, tenant isolation, control flash background processes, and build their own application-centric storage protocols.

Software-Enabled Flash™ is a new storage paradigm engineered as a vendor neutral Linux Foundation project. This technology is dedicated to delivering the full power and flexibility of software-definable flash to developers. It is built on a hardware architecture focused on low-level flash management and abstraction, combined with an open-source, host-based software stack optimized for data placement control, latency prioritization, and protocol creation. Hardware from KIOXIA implementing this new Software-Enabled Flash technology will be sampling soon with select customers.