There's a quiet shift happening in storage engineering. It's not about faster IOPS or bigger flash arrays. It's about density, power, and what happens when a small team decides to build their own SSDs from scratch.
Novodisq is a New Zealand-based startup founded in 2018. They showed up at the 66th IT Press Tour with a pretty bold claim: 11.5 petabytes of storage in a 2U form factor, drawing 1200 watts at full capacity. That's not marketing fluff. It's the result of years of internal proofs of concept and a deliberate decision to go beyond off-the-shelf components.
Here's how they got there.
Why They Built Their Own SSDs
Novodisq didn't start out building custom drives. Their first two proofs of concept used commercial off-the-shelf SSDs in custom form factors. It didn't work. The COTS drives available at the time were either chasing high-performance benchmarks or targeting consumer workloads. Neither fit what Novodisq needed.
Their core insight was about the actual usage pattern of most enterprise data. It's write-once, read-sometimes. Data gets ingested and then mostly sits there—retained for legal, regulatory, or future analysis reasons. Some of it won't be touched for years. That's a very different workload than what most SSD firmware is optimized for.
So Novodisq built their own. Custom PCBs, custom firmware, and full control over the power and performance trade-offs. Micron supplies the NAND. Microchip provides the NVMe controllers. Novodisq writes the firmware on top.
The result is a drive architecture tuned specifically for long-term, low-power storage. They've achieved proof of life on their custom PCB—every NAND byte is addressable and functional. That's a real milestone for a team building SSDs from the ground up.
The AMD Versal G2 SoC: Where the Interesting Engineering Lives
Each Novoblade module is built around an AMD Versal G2 SoC. This chip is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Versal combines ARM cores for running Linux and standard software stacks with a large block of FPGA fabric and dedicated AI accelerators. The same chip family shows up in Subaru's self-driving car systems. In Novoblade, it handles RAID, encryption, and checksumming entirely in hardware—none of that work hits the CPU.
But the FPGA fabric opens up more interesting possibilities. For genomics workloads, algorithms are increasingly being ported to run on FPGAs. Novodisq's architecture can ingest data, process it through FPGA logic in real time, and store it—all within a single blade module. For CCTV and video surveillance, the Versal has hardware video codecs and AI cores built in. You can inline recompress video streams, run detection models, and write long-term storage, all on the same hardware.
This isn't a storage box with compute bolted on afterward. The compute and storage are designed together from the start.
The Blade and Backplane Architecture
A single Novoblade module holds up to 576TB — that's four custom SSDs per blade in the production design. The prototype shown at FMS'25 had two SSDs installed, totaling 288 TB of raw NAND in one module.
Twenty of these blades fit into a 2U backplane chassis. The backplane handles networking and power distribution, and it supports multi-tenancy out of the box. The first four blades could belong to one customer, the next five to another, air-gapped within the same 2U unit. That's useful for managed service providers deploying shared infrastructure.
A single blade is already a functional Linux server on its own. You can start with one to three blades and scale up incrementally. No need to commit to a full 20-blade deployment upfront.
What This Means for Developers
The system runs standard Linux. No proprietary OS, no custom stack you need to learn. Kubernetes works. Existing tools like iSCSI and NFS work. Red Hat and other Kubernetes providers are on the radar for long-term support partnerships.
For developers working on data-heavy pipelines—genomics, video processing, AI training data management—this is worth watching. The FPGA acceleration during data ingestion is a real capability, not a roadmap item.
The Novoforge Dev Kit
Novodisq also introduced Novoforge™, their development kit. It's a 1U or 2U platform with eight E3.L hot-swap bays (currently around 0.5PB with available NAND), 16 ports of 2.5GbE with 800W PoE++ for edge and CCTV use cases, dual 10GbE uplinks, FPGA I/O, GNSS timing, and even DisplayPort over USB-C for workstation use.
It's designed for pilot projects and hands-on testing. Novodisq is already in conversations with customers about purchasing Novoforge units. If you're evaluating storage architectures for edge AI or sovereign data deployments, this is the entry point.
Where Things Stand
Novodisq is a seed-stage company. They have two New Zealand VCs, a tight engineering team, and 3-4 pilot customers in discussion across different verticals. Manufacturing is currently in Christchurch, but they've confirmed they can move production to Europe or the US if customers need it for supply chain or sovereignty reasons.
They'll be back at FMS 2026. The technology is real. The question now is whether the market moves fast enough to match what they've built.
