The future of storage is clearly solid-state drives. Even the early generations of SSDs were faster than conventional hard drives. Now they are catching up with hard drives in terms of storage size, leaving price as the only key differentiator. But SSDs have another advantage: as they are essentially just lots of chips rather than rotating discs, they can easily be crammed into new and unusual form factors.

With that in mind, Intel this week announced a brand new SSD form factor called “ruler”(Opens in a new window) aimed squarely at the data center.

Unlike conventional PCs, data centers use rack units to store servers, which typically have a width of 19 or 23 inches, and a height of 1.75 inches. The term 1U refers to filling a single rack unit within a rack cage, with a rack cage typically measuring 42U. These defined sizes mean storage is limited by how many standard drives can fit into one or more rack units, and inevitably there ends up being wasted space.

Intel’s ruler form factor aims to solve the space problem by being designed specifically to fit perfectly within a 1U rack unit. They are long and skinny drives as the image courtesy of TechGage(Opens in a new window) above shows. Intel says it offers up to 1 petabyte (1,000 terabytes) of storage per 1U. So if you filled an entire 42U rack cage with ruler SSDs you’d have 42 petabytes of storage to play with.

Although not available yet, Intel says both its 3D NAND SSDs and Optane SSDs will be offered in the Ruler form factor.

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Intel also announced new S4500 and S4600 Series SSDs for data centers that use a new Intel-developed SATA controller and firmware, and 32-layer 3D NAND. They are meant as an easy transition SSD for data centers upgrading from hard drive. There’s also new dual port SSDs offering more bandwidth and lower latency than Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drives and SSDs.