Micron Technology, a leader in innovative data center solutions, today announced it has achieved its qualification sample milestone for the Micron CZ120 memory expansion modules using Compute Express Link (CXL). Micron is the first in the industry to achieve this milestone, which accelerates the adoption of CXL solutions within the data center to tackle the growing memory challenges stemming from existing data-intensive workloads and emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads.

Using a new and emerging CXL standard, the CZ120 required substantial hardware testing for reliability, quality and performance across CPU providers and OEMs, along with comprehensive software testing for compatibility and compliance with OS and hypervisor vendors. This achievement reflects the collaboration and commitment across the data center ecosystem to validate the advantages of CXL memory. By testing the combined products for interoperability and compatibility across hardware and software, the Micron CZ120 memory expansion modules satisfy the rigorous standards for reliability, quality and performance required by customers' data centers.

Leaked Samsung PBSSD presentation material popped up online a couple of days prior to the kick-off day of NVIDIA's GTC 2024 conference (March 18)—reports (at the time) jumped on the potential introduction of a "petabyte (PB)-level SSD solution," alongside an enterprise subscription service for the US market. Tom's Hardware took the time to investigate this matter—in-person—on the showroom floor up in San Jose, California. It turns out that interpretations of pre-event information were slightly off—according to on-site investigations: "despite the name, PBSSD is not a petabyte-scale solid-state drive (Samsung's highest-capacity drive can store circa 240 TB), but rather a 'petascale' storage system that can scale-out all-flash storage capacity to petabytes."

Samsung showcased a Supermicro Petascale server design, but a lone unit is nowhere near capable of providing a petabyte of storage—the Tom's Hardware reporter found out that the demonstration model housed: "sixteen 15.36 TB SSDs, so for now the whole 1U unit can only pack up to 245.76 TB of 3D NAND storage (which is pretty far from a petabyte), so four of such units will be needed to store a petabyte of data." Company representatives also had another Supermicro product at their booth: "(an) H13 all-flash petascale system with CXL support that can house eight E3.S SSDs (with) four front-loading E3.S CXL bays for memory expansion."