At FMS 2024, the technological necessities from the storage and reminiscence subsystem took middle stage. Both SSD and controller distributors had numerous demonstrations touting their suitability for various levels of the AI knowledge pipeline – ingestion, preparation, coaching, checkpointing, and inference. Vendors like Solidigm have several types of SSDs optimized for various levels of the pipeline. At the identical time, controller distributors have taken benefit of one of many options launched not too long ago within the NVM Express customary – Flexible Data Placement (FDP).
FDP entails the host offering data / hints in regards to the areas the place the controller might place the incoming write knowledge to be able to scale back the write amplification. These hints are generated based mostly on particular block sizes marketed by the system. The function is totally backwards-compatible, with non-FDP hosts working simply as earlier than with FDP-enabled SSDs, and vice-versa.
Silicon Motion’s MonTitan Gen 5 Enterprise SSD Platform was introduced again in 2022. Since then, Silicon Motion has been touting the pliability of the platform, permitting its clients to include their very own options as a part of the customization course of. This method is widespread within the enterprise area, as now we have 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 the benefits of versatile knowledge placement by permitting a single QLC SSD based mostly on their MonTitan platform to participate in numerous levels of the AI knowledge pipeline whereas sustaining the required high quality of service (minimal bandwidth) for every course of. The firm even has a trademarked title (PerformaShape) for the firmware function within the controller that enables the isolation of various concurrent SSD accesses (from totally different levels within the AI knowledge pipeline) to ensure this QoS. Silicon Motion claims that this scheme will allow its clients to get the utmost write efficiency doable from QLC SSDs with out negatively impacting the efficiency of different forms of accesses.
Silicon Motion and Phison have market management within the consumer SSD controller market with comparable approaches. However, their enterprise SSD controller advertising could not be extra totally different. While 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 technology, and as an alternative opting to get the SSDs certified with totally different cloud service suppliers themselves), Silicon Motion is choosing a special method. The flexibility and customization prospects could make platforms just like the MonTitan attraction to flash array distributors.
