Samsung has announced that it is exploring a new business model that is likely to attract a lot of attention from partners and rivals alike.
PBSSD as a service is what the company calls a high-capacity SSD subscription service that it says “goes beyond capacity limits.” So it is neither a cloud storage service nor a cloud backup solution, at least not for now.
in a blog post On the company's website, Yongcheol Bae, executive vice president of memory product planning at Samsung Electronics, revealed that it is envisioned as a business structure where customers use services instead of purchasing a server configured with SSD. That sounds a lot like what other providers like Pure Storage offer.
Samsung petabyte SSD
As a high-capacity SSD subscription service, Bae continues, “it is expected to help reduce customers' initial investment cost of storage infrastructure as well as maintenance costs by providing customers with a petabyte-scale case.” which works as a memory expansion.
The Petabyte SSD architecture was introduced in August 2023 and aimed to provide a “petabyte-scale ultra-high capacity solution that provides high scalability by varying capacity depending on the application.”
A few days ago we learned that Solidigm, one of Samsung's rivals, was selling its 61.44TB SSD for about $60 per TB, which would put the price of 1PB at approximately $60,000 (although the cost of the server would have to be added) . etc).
Low Price Cloud SSD Backup
Flash is expensive and what Samsung is trying to do is offer a way for those looking for ultra-fast storage to reduce their capital expenditure. Whether or not Samsung will sell them as basic or with an additional layer of software and services (courtesy of third-party partners) remains to be seen.
However, what we do know is that this is not a 1PB SSD, but rather a box containing several SSDs (probably four of the 256TB SSD revealed during Flash Memory Summit 2023). If you want the real thing, you'll have to wait a little longer. In March 2023, NAND product planning group vice president and general manager Kyungryun Kim revealed that the company wanted to launch a 1PB SSD (1000TB) “in the next decade.”
We don't know when it will be released, but it will be interesting to see how it compares to Pure Storage's DFM (Direct Flash Module), which currently has 75TB capacities and will likely ship. 300 TB in 2026. A Purestorage FlashBlade//E AFA storage system includes 55 DFM to deliver 4PB storage in a 6U rack. That's now. In two years, that will increase to 16PB or about 2.5PB per 1U and Samsung knows it.
And just for comparison, provisioning 1PB of local SSD space from one of the hyperscalers (e.g. Google Cloud) costs a cool $43,000 per month when you make a three-year commitment.
