Kioxia and Dell Technologies have announced an object storage configuration with 157PB of raw capacity in a standard 42U rack. According to Kioxia’s November 11 announcement, the system combines Dell’s ObjectScale software-defined storage platform with 16 PowerEdge R7725xd servers and 640 Kioxia LC9 SSDs, each rated at 245.76TB.
The companies describe it as the industry’s first single-rack 157PB object storage solution. That is a company claim, not an independently verified comparison. The 157PB figure is raw capacity, not a measure of usable storage after any data-protection overhead.
Dell positions ObjectScale for unstructured-data workloads, including AI training, big-data analytics and cloud-native applications. Kioxia says high-capacity NVMe drives could help accommodate growing data volumes without increasing rack space, power and cooling needs at the same rate.
Kioxia has not published a standard retail price for the LC9 series. Based on overseas integrator and distributor quotes of roughly $21,000–$30,000 per drive cited by IT Home, the 640 SSDs alone would cost approximately $13.44 million–$19.2 million. That estimate is not a quoted price for the complete system.
The LC9 series uses Kioxia’s eighth-generation BiCS FLASH 3D QLC technology and a 32-die stacked architecture. Its E3.L model reaches 245.76TB; 2.5-inch and E3.S models reach 122.88TB. Kioxia also lists flash-die failure protection and a mean time to failure of 2.5 million hours. The series supports PCIe 5.0, NVMe 2.0 and NVMe-MI 1.2c, alongside selected OCP Data Center NVMe SSD v2.5 requirements and flexible data placement. Listed security options include SIE, SED and FIPS 140-3 validation, with support for CNSA 2.0 firmware signing.