Samsung is making history today, as the company announced its first-ever enterprise ZNS (Zoned Namespace specification) SSD (solid-state drive) solution. It’s called the PM1731a, and thanks to ZNS technology, it promises up to four times longer lifespan in storage server, data center, and cloud environments.
The Zoned Namespace specification was first released by the NVMe organization last year, and in layman’s terms, the technology allows data to be grouped on SSDs based on usage and access frequency, thus improving performance as well as the SSD’s lifespan. In addition, ZNS also allows server systems to run big data and AI applications more reliably and efficiently.
These benefits combined significantly reduce the number of write operations and the drive’s write amplification factor (WAF). WAF represents the amount of actual writes a drive performs compared to the number of writes instructed by the host system.
