Kioxia seeks to make the SSD more programmable

NAND flash maker Kioxia has expanded its Software-Enabled Flash technology to bring a greater degree of programmability to NAND storage. The move will benefit hyperscalers the most but will have benefits for enterprises and SMBs as well. Kioxia (formerly Toshiba) first introduced SEF last year. It’s an open-source API that operates as a new kind of hardware flash controller to offload some functions to a controller, thus freeing up the CPU, while allowing large data-center environments to manage at scale. Because the API is open source, competitors in the flash space can adopt the API and customize it for their hardware. Hyperscalers think about SSDs in terms of deploying and serving workloads at scale. Kioxia notes that cloud providers often have different types of drives they deploy for different use cases, like block storage versus file storage or ZNS.