Xinnor RAIDs Kioxia datacenter SSDs for performance

xiRAID dev Xinnor says its software can efficiently manage a suite of Kioxia CM7 datacenter SSDs, claiming to achieve over 70 percent of their top sequential read speed in a system it plans to demo later this week.

The CM7 SSDs are capable of reaching up to 2.7 million/600,000 random read/write IOPS and can deliver a bandwidth of up to 14/6.75 GBps for sequential read/write operations. Unlike conventional systems that use an external hardware RAID card, SoftwareRAID processes the RAID parity calculations using the host CPU. According to Xinnor, its xiRAID software surpasses the speed of other software RAID (SWRAID) alternatives. The benchmark results for RAID 5 and 6 were obtained using a dual gen 4 Xeon SP Ingrasys server in conjunction with a dozen CM7 dual-port, PCIe gen 5 interface SSDs. 

Ingrasys VP Brad Reger said: “The tests run in our lab on latest Ingrasys PCIe gen 5 server demonstrates that xiRAID excels in harnessing the full potential of PCIe gen 5 NVMe SSDs from Kixoia, showcasing remarkable performance with the reliability of RAID.” Although it doesn’t fully utilize the SSDs’ capabilities, the RAID 5 and 6 performance charts confirm it’s close.

Xinnor RAID performance

For context, a standalone Kioxia CM7 Series SSD can reach 14GBps in sequential read and 6.75GBps in sequential write. Its random read performance is rated at 2.7 million IOPS, with random write performance exceeding 300,000 IOPS.

Xinnor says its software has lockless datapath architecture that evenly distributes the workload across all CPU cores. Incorporating AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions) technology, the software can process multiple data units simultaneously using parallel YMM register operations. This capability allows the Xinnor software to match or even outperform certain hardware RAID cards.

While Xinnor claims that these performance levels reduce the need for external RAID cards, it’s worth noting that GPU-powered RAID card manufacturer Graid claims to have developed technology capable of boosting sequential writes to 90GBps or more in RAID-5 settings.

Both Xinnor and Kioxia are set to showcase their collaborative system at the FMS 2023 event in Santa Clara later this week.