Kioxia has launched a prototype broadband SSD with an optical interface for next-generation data centers.

The company first unveiled the solution at the Future of Memory and Storage event in Santa Clara, California.

The SSD was conceived as part of the Next Generation Green Data Center Technology Development project which helps to fund the development of technologies that will achieve more than 40 percent in energy savings when compared to current data center solutions.

According to Kioxia, the SSD replaces electrical wiring in the interconnect with optical wiring, which allows the company to expand the physical distance between compute and storage devices without compromising energy efficiency or signal quality.

Currently, Kioxia has been able to achieve a distance of 40 meters but is planning to increase that length to 100 meters in the future.

The company said optical wiring will also allow for greater flexibility in data center system design and applications, in addition to making it possible to aggregate and interconnect individual components that comprise systems, such as SSDs and CPUs, thus improving the efficiency of workloads.

Kioxia said that the high signal integrity offered by the optical interface will also make it well-suited for inclusion in high-performance computing systems that operate in harsh environments, such as space.

"The Kioxia broadband SSD with optical interface prototype, when realized alongside other optical-based devices and systems within data center infrastructure, has the potential to revolutionize data centers as we know them today," said Axel Störmann, CTO & VP at Kioxia Europe GmbH.

"The new SSDs will allow the development of future 'greener' server environments offering not only overall energy efficiency but also greater storage efficiency, scale, and performance [through improved throughput and latency]."