At FMS 2024, the technological necessities from the storage and reminiscence subsystem took middle stage. Each SSD and controller distributors had numerous demonstrations touting their suitability for various levels of the AI information pipeline – ingestion, preparation, coaching, checkpointing, and inference. Distributors like Solidigm have several types of SSDs optimized for various levels of the pipeline. On the similar time, controller distributors have taken benefit of one of many options launched not too long ago within the NVM Specific normal – Flexible Data Placement (FDP).
FDP entails the host offering info / hints in regards to the areas the place the controller may place the incoming write information so as to cut back the write amplification. These hints are generated based mostly on particular block sizes marketed by the machine. The characteristic is totally backwards-compatible, with non-FDP hosts working simply as earlier than with FDP-enabled SSDs, and vice-versa.
Silicon Movement’s MonTitan Gen 5 Enterprise SSD Platform was introduced again in 2022. Since then, Silicon Movement has been touting the pliability of the platform, permitting its prospects to include their very own options as a part of the customization course of. This strategy is widespread within the enterprise house, as we’ve seen with Marvell’s Bravera SC5 SSD controller within the DapuStor SSDs and Microchip’s Flashtec controllers within the Longsys FORESEE enterprise SSDs.
At FMS 2024, the corporate was demonstrating some great benefits of versatile information placement by permitting a single QLC SSD based mostly on their MonTitan platform to participate in numerous levels of the AI information pipeline whereas sustaining the required high quality of service (minimal bandwidth) for every course of. The corporate even has a trademarked title (PerformaShape) for the firmware characteristic within the controller that permits the isolation of various concurrent SSD accesses (from totally different levels within the AI information pipeline) to ensure this QoS. Silicon Movement claims that this scheme will allow its prospects to get the utmost write efficiency attainable from QLC SSDs with out negatively impacting the efficiency of different sorts of accesses.
Silicon Movement and Phison have market management within the shopper SSD controller market with comparable approaches. Nevertheless, their enterprise SSD controller advertising could not be extra totally different. Whereas Phison has gone in for a turnkey resolution with their Gen 5 SSD platform (to the extent of not adopting the white label route for this era, and as an alternative opting to get the SSDs certified with totally different cloud service suppliers themselves), Silicon Movement is choosing a distinct strategy. The flexibleness and customization prospects could make platforms just like the MonTitan attraction to flash array distributors.
