At the 2025 Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) Conference today, Supermicro was awarded the Best of Show Award in the Most Innovative Technology Category for the Petascale Storage Server using the NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip. This storage optimized all-flash server extends Supermicro’s proven line of 1U and 2U Petascale servers with a first-of-its category system based on the NVIDIA CPU. While storage servers have traditionally been based on x86 architecture CPUs, the Supermicro Petascale ARS-121L-NE316R is the first server from a Tier 1 provider to use the NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip for a storage server application.
The system’s Arm-based CPU enables reduced power consumption while providing high multi-core performance for storage workloads. The ARS-121L-NE316R storage server is based on Supermicro’s proven Petascale line of storage-optimized servers and supports 16 hot-swap E3.S PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD drives in a compact 1U form-factor. The total capacity of the system is 983TB raw using 61.44TB SSDs and a rack of 40 servers provides 39.3PB of raw storage capacity.
Designed for Scale-out Storage
The ARS-121L-NE316R is designed to be used with a scale-out storage architecture implemented as parallel file systems or object storage, which are widely used in applications requiring high storage bandwidth and IOPS such as AI training workloads, analytics and media post-production. A key enabler for these architectures is high performance networking to support both internode East-West network traffic within the storage cluster and North-South network traffic from the compute cluster to the storage targets. The Petascale storage server with the Grace CPU supports two PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL slots and supports NVIDIA’s Spectrum™-X networking with the NVIDIA BlueField®-3 SuperNIC or NVIDIA ConnectX®-7 NIC.
The system is powered by NVIDIA’s Grace CPU Superchip which has 144 Arm Neoverse V2 cores, using the NVIDIA Scalable Coherency Fabric to connect cores, cache and IO and 960GB of LPDDR5X memory integrated on the CPU module to deliver up to 2x the performance of traditional CPUs at the same power usage This chip architecture provides power-efficient processing up to 144 cores for large scale-out storage workloads.
Erasure Coding Data Protection
Most software-defined storage applications use software-based erasure-coding (EC) to deliver good performance across multiple nodes and ensure that the data is recoverable in the event of one or more SSD failures or even an entire storage node becoming unavailable. Unlike replication-based or RAID-based data protection approaches, erasure coding uses communication theory-based algorithms such as Reed-Solomon or Cauchy codes to calculate parity data which is used to recover data in the event of SSD or node failure. The generation of EC parity data and the recovery calculations is computationally intensive and a good fit for the Grace CPU’s many cores. In addition, the recovery process, while time-consuming for large data sets, can be accelerated through faster networking as large amounts of data are exchanged in recreating the original data from the parity data.
When software-defined, distributed flash storage is used for AI, HPC or analytics, the storage typically must support high bandwidth networking, RDMA, and large, bursty data flows. The Petascale All-Flash Storage Server’s support for NVIDIA BlueField or ConnectX SuperNICs delivers fast, efficient RDMA (RoCE) networking over multiple 100 or 200GbE connections.
Conclusion
The Supermicro Petascale with the Grace Storage Server is part of Supermicro’s all-flash Petascale EDSFF-based storage servers. Together with Supermicro’s extensive ecosystem of file, object, block, data protection and CXL memory application partners, Supermicro has data management solutions for all high-performance workloads.
Additional Resources:
- Petascale Grace Storage System
- All-Flash NVMe Servers for Advanced Computing
- Supermicro Software-Defined Storage and Memory Solutions
- Accelerating Data Pipelines with AI Storage
- Data Lakes for AI and Analytics
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