Flash drive-nvme leads the new flash Era

Flash drive-nvme leads the new flash Era

The era of big data is coming soon, and traditional rotary disks are too slow in terms of performance and capacity. The absolute advantage of flash memory in iops, latency, and bandwidth makes it favored and quickly replaces hard disks as an indispensable storage medium. 2013 was the year when flash was scaled into the data center, making it the first year of flash in history ". With the rapid development of the past year, the role of flash memory in data centers is becoming more and more diversified, from the PCIe flash memory card and storage array on the server, the full flash memory array most suitable for storing hot data, a hybrid array suitable for Hierarchical Storage, to the power-down protection flash memory module in the raid card, and so on.

Looking forward to the future, with the increasing acceptance of FLASH products, the competition among FLASH manufacturers will become increasingly fierce. At the same time, increasingly complex and diverse applications are driving demand for different FLASH products. On the one hand, flash memory is redefining the storage technology; on the other hand, the 2014 s will also mean the survival of many flash manufacturers, so there is a "flash memory survival year" reputation. In the next round of flash drive, who will lead the trend and win the championship?

In the traditional storage architecture, due to the limitation of hard disk access speed, the general SATA and SAS interfaces in the past can fully meet the bandwidth needs of the hard disk, and face the improvement of Flash speed by hundreds of times, the interface bandwidth becomes the biggest bottleneck of I/O. It can be said that the superior performance of flash memory transfers the storage bottleneck from the media to the interface. The success of fusion-Io comes directly from its patented PCIe flash card, which can be added to the server to accelerate applications and achieve low access latency in microseconds. SATA/SAS cannot reach this level in any way. Therefore, in the Flash era, significant changes to interface specifications are inevitable.

The nvme standard for PCIe interfaces came into being. The standard is developed by more than 80 industry leading companies, including IDT, Dell, Intel, EMC, netapp, Oracle, and Cisco. NVM Express is a scalable host control chip interface standard developed for enterprises and common client systems that use PCI Express SSD. The nvme 1.0 standard was released three years ago and is continuously updated. This standard defines the optimal register interface, instruction set, and feature set for PCIe SSD, and provides scalable interfaces to realize the present and future performance potential of SSD technology. This eliminates the need for original device manufacturers to standardize multiple SSD Drives to accelerate the extended use of PCIe SSDS. The work of this organization not only ensures the comprehensive and coordinated development of the entire nvme ecosystem, but also breaks the industrial limitations caused by the previous use of private interfaces by PCIe flash memory manufacturers, this allows customers to choose from the Open Industrial Ecosystem chain, which is of epoch significance for industrial scale improvement and user cost optimization.

As a founding member of the nvme standard organization, the IDT company acquired by PMC last year is committed to promoting the formulation and development of nvme standards from beginning to end. In 2011, IDT launched the world's first nvme enterprise-class flash controller that provides internal PCIe gen3 support, it helps storage and server OEMs overcome the inherent latency and throughput Bottlenecks of traditional SAS/Sata-based SSD design, significantly improving performance. The PCIe-based SSD and nvme Host Control interfaces perfectly solve the interface bottleneck problem. PMC has released a series of PCIe flash controllers that fully comply with nvme to achieve the best iops in the industry. By removing traditional storage architectures, PMC significantly reduces latency, power consumption, and costs. In addition to fully supporting the PCIe gen3 host interface for maximum throughput, PMC's nvme flash controller also provides programming interfaces to help customers differentiate their solutions by using the PMC reference firmware's self-made firmware. In addition, it can maximize Random storage I/O performance-a key requirement driven by multi-core CPU design and virtualization.

This design supports enterprise-level functions, including advanced encryption, data integrity, and reliability.

Compared with the existing flash storage products, PMC's nvme flash controller has a leader in throughput, latency, energy consumption, compatibility, and scalability.

compared with the traditional SCSI standard, the nvme controller can release all the potential of flash memory, significantly improving performance and greatly reducing power consumption. Specific advantages include:
· performance: compared with the existing nand flash memory, the throughput is improved several times.
· latency: compared with the existing SCSI/SAS architecture, nvme SSD can reduce latency by over 50%.
· iops: nvmepcie SSD provides 10 times the iops compared to high-end enterprise-level sata ssd.
· Power Consumption: The PMC nvme technology incorporates the automatic power consumption status switching function, without software intervention. After a specific idle period, the nvme controller automatically switches to a low power consumption state. In addition, PMC's nvme Controller provides a dynamic energy management interface that allows you to effectively manage power consumption and performance through firmware.
. Scalability: nvme supports the development of NVM technology in the future to lower latency overhead to less than one microsecond. Therefore, it has the scalability to support the technology of the next decade. Given that every 100 of the subtle website loading latency represents a 1% loss of sales for Amazon, the effects of latency improvements brought by nvme flash Control Technology on the market will be immeasurable.

Compared with the existing nvme solution, the PMC solution has been available for about one year earlier, and provides significant performance advantages (3 ~ 4 times more than competing technologies), and the capacity is better than the competitor's 3 ~ 4 times more. It is embodied in the following aspects:
· Greatly improve latency and system throughput
· Use a standard nvme driver to simplify OEM Authentication
· Software-defined Flash "-customized firmware provides differentiated products
Compared with other PCIe FLASH products that use monopoly private interfaces (such as fusion Io flash memory products), PMC's nvme-based PCIe flash memory controller is highly compatible and outperforms competitors by 20 ~ As many as 50%. In addition, the host resources used are greatly reduced (including CPU and memory) and have obvious price advantages.

PMC nvme Flash Controller users include enterprise-level SSD manufacturers with PCIe Gen 3/2 and standard nvme-based. This SSD can be used in enterprise-level centralized storage systems, server cache applications, and other systems requiring high-performance storage drives. End users can deploy these PCIe-based SSD systems in their data centers for cloud computing and key commercial applications, such as online transaction processing, financial data processing, database mining, and any application sensitive to storage performance. The PCIe Flash Controller Developed by PMC based on the open-standard nvme has benefited from its constant promotion and innovation in nvme standards, and is far ahead of competitors in terms of time-to-market and core performance, it is bound to become an indispensable foundation for high-performance applications in the big data era.

The surge in traffic has led to the flash tide. Gartner expects that the PCIe enterprise-level controller market will quadruple by 2015, reaching nearly 3.5 million. PMC's nvme-based PCIe flash controller is a leading player in the market and has been used by many world-class social media and search engine vendors. We are in close contact with a number of data centers and SSD Enterprises in China. We believe that in the near future, the PCIe Flash Controller released by PMC based on the Open Standard nvme will surely lead the transformation of China's data centers, it brings new performance to enterprises and users.