Exclusive: Samsung launches a Petabyte SSD subscription – PBSSD-as-a-service is definitely not your usual cloud storage service, at least not for now
Samsung has announced that it is exploring a new business model that will likely receive a lot of attention from partners and rivals alike.
PBSSD as a service is what the company calls a high-capacity SSD subscription service, which it says “exceeds capacity limits.” So it’s neither a cloud storage service nor a cloud backup solution, at least for now.
In a blog post on the company’s website, Yongcheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics, announced that it is seen as a business structure where customers use services instead of purchasing a server configured with SSDs. That’s very similar to what other vendors, such as Pure Storage, offer.
Petabyte SSD from Samsung
As a high-capacity SSD subscription service, Bae continues, it is “expected to help reduce the initial capital cost of customers’ storage infrastructure, as well as maintenance costs, by providing customers with a petabyte-scale box that functions as memory expansion”.
The Petabyte SSD architecture was unveiled in August 2023 and aimed to provide an “ultra-high capacity solution at petabyte scale that provides high scalability by varying capacity depending on the application.”
A few days ago we heard that Solidigm, a competitor to Samsung, was selling its 61.44 TB SSD for about $60 per TB, which would bring the price of 1 PB to about $60,000 (although you add in the cost of the server should add up). etc).
Cloud SSD backup cheap
Flash is expensive, and what Samsung is trying to do is give people looking for high-speed storage a way to reduce their capital expenditures. Whether or not Samsung will sell these as barebones or with an extra layer of software and services (courtesy of third-party partners) remains to be seen.
What we do know is that this is not a 1PB SSD, but a box with multiple SSDs (probably four of the 256 TB SSDs as unveiled at Flash Memory Summit 2023). If you want the real deal, you’ll have to wait a little longer. In March 2023, Kyungryun Kim, VP and General Manager of NAND Product Planning Group, revealed that the company 1PB (1000TB) SSD “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 a 75TB capacity and is likely to ship 300TB by 2026. A Purestorage FlashBlade//E AFA storage system contains 55 DFM and delivers 4PB storage in a 6U rack. That’s now. In two years that will go to 16 PB or about 2.5 PB per 1U and Samsung knows that.
And for comparison, provisioning 1 PB of local SSD space from one of the hyperscalers (e.g Google Cloud) costs a whopping $43,000 per month if you make a three-year commitment.