Prosperity of enterprise-class PCle SSD
The biggest event in the storage market this year is sharp price reduction of flash contributes to rapid growth of SSD shipments. As we all know, SSD is divided into consumer-class SSD and enterprise-class SSD. The growth of the former mainly comes from the replacement of mechanical hard drives year by year, so its growth rate is relatively stable. The growth of latter is not only for a substitute for mechanical hard drives, but also for a strong demand for massive new data storage. Therefore, the growth rate of enterprise-class SSD will be significantly higher than that of consumer-class SSD in the future.
The following picture shows the penetration rate of consumer-class SSDs in personal computers predicted by Chinese flash market. It can be seen that most mechanical hard drives will eventually be replaced by SSDs, but the growth rate will slow down in the future.
The largest traditional part of enterprise-class SSD is SATA SSD. However, as the price of PCIe SSD decreases gradually and enterprise server support for PCIe SSD is becoming more and more mature, the fastest growth will be PCIe SSD in the future. As shown below, global PCIe SSD shipment in 2018 is 8 million and in 2021 will increase to 30 million, nearly four times.
Many storage and master giants have seen this huge market and started to invest in the development of enterprise-class PCIe SSD and master chip. However, why do they start so late?
The storage industry is highly demanding for product quality. After all, it is the most important data for users, and failure rate and security are very essential. In addition, stable performance is also a very important indicator for users in the enterprise-class market.
It’s easy to speak stability and reliability, but it takes 3 to 4 years of product polishing and more than tens of thousands of pieces of shipment to achieve. This requires enterprises in this industry to have a very strong firmware development team. Chip hardware can only provide the performance basis of SSD. When SSD is used, there will be a lot of background data handling and task scheduling. At this time firmware is playing a role.
The following figure shows internal structure and functional division of SSD. SSD are based on flash chip arrays. Enterprise-class SSDs need to select high-quality flash particles to provide high reliability. Besides, the key to stability is master chip. Master chip is mainly divided into two parts: chip hardware and firmware (based on chip hardware). In terms of workload and importance, chip hardware and firmware account for 50%, respectively.
Hardware is mainly used for data processing and other tasks with large amount of calculation such as PCIe physical layer implementation, read-write data path, DDR interface circuit, multiple embedded CPUs and SRAM on-chip storage, data error correction and data encryption, etc.
Firmware is various management algorithms of SSD, including NVMe protocol implementation, FTL (Flash Translation Layer) mapping table management, garbage collection, wear leveling, performance optimization, stability optimization, all kinds of exception handling, start-up and shutdown data storage, data recovery from abnormal power failure, different flash particle adaptation, etc. The more customers and shipments are, the greater the workload of firmware is. This is because not only to develop a variety of new functions, but also to solve many problems found.
Memblaze is a rare domestic company with mature and reliable ability to develop enterprise-level SSD firmware. It has taken nine years for continuous research and development in the field of enterprise-level SSD, and has successfully achieved nearly global PCIe SSD shipment of 100,000 pieces. It has to be said that Memblaze started its business quite hard and invested a lot of money, high-end talent and time.
With the rapid development of Chinese economy in recent years, many people are accustomed to making money rapidly and are unwilling to do core technology research and development that requires long-term technological investment. However, if Chinese enterprises want to compete with foreign companies in high-profit industries for a long time, core technology is indispensable.
Memblaze believes that the future of enterprise-class storage depends on PCIe SSD. If you want to be a leader in this industry, you must master core technology. Now, with the outbreak of enterprise PCIe SSD market, Memblaze's persistence for many years has finally paid off. The larger PCIe SSD shipments, the more stability and the less failure rate, because most of problems have been found and solved in the process of use. Now, R&D team of PCIe SSD with stable commercial and leading performance has become a scarce resource. When international giants want to enter enterprise-class PCIe SSD industry, they find they have fallen behind.
As shown below, Memblaze PCIe SSD Pblaze5 ranks first in random read IOPS and latency in the same batch tests in the evaluation from StorageReivew.
The following figure displays a low-power dual-port NVMe SSD developed by Memblaze. The left is a client server, and the right are two control hosts connected to the intermediate NVMe SSD. Typical working power consumption is only 10W, which can be used in dual-controlled full flash array. Storage power consumption is only 240W in a machine using 24 disks, when the capacity can be up to hundreds of TB.
There are three hotspots in enterprise storage technology in the future: SDS (Software Defined Storage), Hyper-Fusion and Full Flash Array. The storage media of these three products will be PCIe SSD. In the traditional storage field, the power of independent research and development in China is relatively weak. However, in the new storage era based on PCIe SSD, high-speed Ethernet and AI computing, Chinese storage companies have risen in an all-round way. We believe that several world-class enterprises will be born in the next ten years.