APEX Storage Launches PCIe 4.0 Card Hosting Up To 21 M.2 SSDs

Jakob Aylesbury / 2 years ago

Apex Storage has announced the release of the X21, an add-in card (AIC) that can accommodate up to 21 PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs supporting capacities of up to 168TB and speeds of up to 31 GBps.

APEX Storage X21

Apex Storage is a newcomer when it comes to storage and is based in Utah with a focus on AIC products. This new X21 is a bigger version of the company’s ‘storage scaler’ card which supported 16 M.2 drives. The X21 is a sandwhich style design with two PCBs coming in at 274.2mm in length and is connected through a standard PCIe 4.0 X16 slot. The card can be connected through PCIe 3.0 but will likely take a significant performance hit. The card features a heatsink which cools the storage controller and PCIe switch with 10 M.2 slots on its interior and the other 11 on the exterior.

APEX Performance

The X21 in a single-card configuration can delvier sequential read and write speeds of up to 30.5GBps and 28.5GBps as well as random performance of 7.5 million IOPS reads and 6.2 million IOPS writes. According to Apex storage in a multi card setup the X21 can reach up to 107GBps sequential reads and 80GBps sequential writes as well as 20 million IOPS reads and 10 million IOPS writes. The X21 is capable of hosting up to 168TB with the existence of 8TB SSDs and will even be capable of 336TB once 16TB SSD’s hit the market.

With the amount of SSD’s this card will power it definitely won’t be able to draw it all from the PCIe slot so the card features 2 6-Pin PCIe power connectors. These 2 additional connectors allow for a maximum power draw of 225W which can produce a fair bit of heat under high load so Apex has reccomended a minimum airflow of 400 LFM for optimal operation.

Features

Single Card Performance
- 7.5M IOPS Rand Read, 6.2M IOPS Rand Write, 30.5 GB/s Seq Read 26.5 GB/s Seq Write
Multi-Card Performance:
- 20M+ IOPS Rand Read, 10M+ IOPS Rand Write, 107 GB/s Seq Read 70 GB/s Seq Write
M.2 SSD Support:
- Supports all major brands of M.2 NVMe SSDs, QLC, TLC, MLC, Intel Optane.
X21 SSD Capacity:
- 168TB of storage with 8TB M.2 NVMe SSD’s, 336TB with Future 16TB M.2.
Raid Flexibility:
- Supports Windows and Linux RAID deployments.
Database Acceleration
- 21 M.2 NVMe SSD per card.
PCI-e Gen 4 Speeds:
- Max throughput at PCI-e Gen 4 speeds.
OS Support:
- Supports for all Linux variants, Windows Server and Windows 10/11