Toshiba and Samsung both introduced Ethernet SSD recently

In the FMS this year, both Toshiba and Samsung have launched the Ethernet SSD, which aim to simplify the storage stack, reduce the design complexity and improve performance.

Although both Samsung and Toshiba have introduced the Ethernet SSD, they adopt different ways in implementation. Samsung adopts the key: value while Toshiba uses the traditional storage methods.

There was the Ethernet SSD before. Seagate has launched Ethernet disk which is called Kinetic that provides the key: value instead of the storage ways of traditional profile, blocks and object storage.

Seagate has a lot of innovation in the disk industry. The Ethernet SSD is one of innovation and Seagate's Ethernet SSD has attracted a lot of attention. From 2015 or 2016, however, there were not almost the news about this product. Other hardware manufacturers do not produce it.

The disk Kinetic has used the onboard NIC and a small processor as key: value storage. The host operating system can directly visit the disk data via Ethernet which is key: value data rather than block or profile. Some people analyze that the reading and writing process of host operating system based on the key value is complex. Compare with the original way of reading and writing, this way has no advantage, which leads to that people lose their enthusiasm for Kinetic.

In the FMS of 2018, Toshiba had launched an Ethernet-based SSD, supporting NVMe-oF protocol. NVMe-oF uses the NVMe protocol via Ethernet or FC network to transmit data that can be transmitted going back and forth at RDMA rate with few microseconds latency.

A smart NIC usually will intercept the data package of NVMe-oF, analyze the data package and then transmit the data into the hard disk via NVMe.

In the FMS of 2018, Toshiba will put 24 pieces of this SSD into a JBOF (that is Just a Bunch of Flash drives: the disk is a JBOD and the box on the flash drive is called a JBOF), which connects to the host by the dual ported 25Gbit Ethernet linked by the Marvell 88SN2400 NVMe-of SSD  controller.

This box filled with 24 pieces of SSDs can random read 16 million 4K IOPS. At that time, Toshiba claimed that it was a record-breaking all-flash product, of which per disk contributed about 660,000 IOPS.

On November 2018, Samsung pointed out that it would develop a Z-SSD like Ethernet SSD which is just PM 983 SSD with NVMe. The biggest difference between Toshiba’s NVMe-oF SSD and Samsung is that Samsung adopts the key: value storage. The product is used to eliminate storage inefficiencies and then reduce latency.

In the FMS last year, Toshiba connected SSD with a NVMe-oF. This SSD has used 96-layers 3D NAND flash, Marvell 88ss5000 controller, 8NAND channel and highest 8GB DRAM. It also can be used with the Marvell data center Ethernet switch and then connected to the host.

Toshiba points out that this year's SSD provides 3GB of throughput per second, with a maximum random IOPS of 650,000, which is a bit lower than last year's performance.

Marvell says on the press that the reason why they develop this is that many the storage end users, servers, the OEM manufacturers of storage system and SSD manufacturers are willing to use the Ethernet.

Toshiba's product is the first product with the integrated Marvell NVMe-oF SSD conversion controller technology on the market. Because SSDs can be used with Marvell Ethernet switch products to achieve optimal storage classification, eliminating the need for expensive CPU and DRAM components while improving overall data center performance.

Chris Mellor, the senior foreign storage media person, points out that Toshiba and Marvell need some giant software manufactures’ help and let people see the low cost and fast speed of software in the Ethernet SSD.

We don’t ensure that whether key value SSD of Samsung will adopt the controller of Marvell. Due to the storage ways of key value of Samsung, the users’ acceptance is definitely lower than Toshiba’s plan.

Western Digital has also a JBOP called Ultrastar Serv24-HA and an OpenFlex combinable system that uses NVMe-oF connectivity.

Now that NVMe-oF has started, the next step is that Western Digital may soon launch its own Ethernet SSD, so the Serv-24-HA and OpenFlex combo systems will soon use Ethernet SSDs.

Fundamentally, replacing traditional PCIe methods with simple, low-power Ethernet fibers can help data centers optimize their infrastructure, making their hardware investments more cost-effective and reducing their storage requirements in face of increasing storage requirements.

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