Introducing Lightning: A flexible NVMe JBOF

This post introduces Lightning, Meta's first NVMe JBOF (Just a Bunch of Flash) solution designed for disaggregated storage. It details the hardware components, including a PCIe retimer card, PCIe Expansion Board (PEB), and PCIe Drive Plane Board (PDPB), enabling end-to-end PCIe Gen 3 connectivity. The design addresses challenges like hot-plug support, management, signal integrity, external cabling, and power consumption, aiming to provide a scalable and flexible flash building block for data centers. The solution is contributed to the Open Compute Project.