LITE-ON (Plextor) Storage will ship its first storage drive supporting the recently-approved Project Denali 1.0 specification this summer.

Announced at the 2019 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit in San Jose, Calif., LITE-ON said its new Open Channel AD2 series SSD, built in collaboration with CNEX Labs, will give data center organizations a "powerful option for improving performance and reducing costs related to cloud and enterprise-based workloads."

“We’ve been at this for quite a while, and with recent progress building out the Project Denali spec, we believe we’ll be ready to ship in the second quarter of this year,” said Darlo Perez, Managing Director of the Americas region for LITE-ON. “For our customers, this should mean massive potential improvements in quality of service (QoS) for cloud computing and enterprise storage. We couldn’t be more excited.”

Project Denali is a standardization and evolution of Open Channel SSD technology that defines the roles of SSD versus that of the host in a standard interface, according to Microsoft. Media management, error correction, mapping of bad blocks and other functionality specific to the flash generation stays on the device while the host receives random writes, transmits streams of sequential writes, maintains the address map, and performs garbage collection. The technology is highly effective in installations that have Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) or microcontrollers to provide SSD aggregation and storage offload functionality.

Backers of Project Denali believe this storage architecture advancement could reduce costs for SSD deployment, improve performance, making these drives more useful and cost-effective for both enterprise organizations and cloud service providers.