Month: October 2018

SSDs Need Controllers with More, NO! Less Power

More Power-Less PowerThe Storage Developer Conference in September gave a rare glimpse into two very different directions that SSD architectures are pursuing.  While some of the conference’s presentations touted SSDs with increasing processing power (Eideticom, NGD, Samsung, and ScaleFlux) other presentations advocated moving processing power out of the SSD and into the host server (Alibaba, CNEX, and Western Digital).

Why would either of these make sense?

A standard SSD has a very high internal bandwidth that encounters a bottleneck as data is forced through a narrower interface.  It’s easy to see that an SSD with 20+ NAND chips, each with an 8-bit interface, could access all 160 bits simultaneously.  Since there’s already a processor inside the  SSD, why not open it to external programming so that it can perform certain tasks within the SSD itself and harness all of that bandwidth?

Example tasks would include Continue reading “SSDs Need Controllers with More, NO! Less Power”

Storage Visions Conference Coming Oct 22

Once again The SSD Guy will be playing a part in the annual Storage Visions conference which has been moved this year to the Santa Clara Hyatt Hotel adjacent to the Santa Clara Convention Center.  It’s now a 2-day conference (October 22-23) and has an agenda packed with interesting subjects, speakers, and panelists.

Storage Visions’ mission is to bring together the vendors, end users, researchers and visionaries that will meet growing demand for digital storage for the “coming data tsunami.”

I will moderate a panel on an exciting new technology that is currently known by a few different names, including “In-Situ Processing,” “Computational Storage,” and “Intelligent SSDs” (iSSD).  It’s a kind of SSD that uses internal processing to reduce the amount of data traffic between the server and storage.  This helps get past an issue that plagues many applications which spend more time and energy moving data back and forth than they do actually processing that data.

The panel, at 8:15 Monday morning, October 22, is Continue reading “Storage Visions Conference Coming Oct 22”