Samsung touts Project Poseidon for open source innovation

Samsung Electronics said on Friday that it will encourage open source innovation with its own storage platform called Project Poseidon.

Project Poseidon is the company’s disaggregated storage platform designed to meet the needs of hyperscale server manufacturers and the data center market.

Earlier in February, the South Korean tech giant had said it has begun mass production of PCIe Gen 4 PM9A3 solid-state drive (SSD), which is compliant with standards set by the Open Compute Project (OCP).

The SSD is made of Samsung’s Gen 6 V-NAND memory, and is designed for maximum performance per watt. It has a sequential read speed of 6950MB/s, double the performance of its predecessor and is 50% more energy efficient.

"Offering the most 1U server-optimized form-factor, the PM9A3 will improve space utilization, add PCIe Gen4 speeds, enable increased capacity and more," said Jongyoul Lee, EVP at Samsung’s chip division. "We see it eventually becoming the most sought-after storage solution on the market for leading cloud data center servers, and one of the more cost-effective."

Samsung is also offering its own software Poseidon OS, the latest version which was released on Github. The “lightweight” storage OS offers improve performance through optimization of the storage stack of NVMe SSDs, while also offering software-designed storage capabilities.

OCP was started by Facebook in 2011 to increase the efficiency of its data centers. Members include Intel, Microsoft, Google, IBM, AMD and others. Samsung joined in 2015, being the only SSD supplier along with Seagate that is part of the group.