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Memory Channel Storage SSDs

will the new concept fly?

should you book a seat yet?

by Zsolt Kerekes, editor - April 29, 2013

Recently we've been hearing more details about the implementation plans for a new type of fast enterprise SSD.

Memory channel storage was devised by Diablo Technologies.

While in stealth mode Diablo had hinted it was planning to use its assets and expertise in DRAM interface chips and datacomms to design a new type of enterprise SSD which would couple - the capacity cost advantages of flash with the low latency characteristics of a RAM "bus" to create a new type of fast storage device which would be an order of magnitude faster at accelerating apps than good old PCIe SSDs.

To make a product like this viable will require world leading skills in flash controller and management expertise - with particular emphasis on expertise in enterprise SSD markets.

Diablo last week announced that it has chosen SMART Storage Systems to exclusively supply the necessary flash SSD expertise.

The 2 companies will work together to bring the first products to market in the coming year. The products will be sold by SMART.

At this point you may well ask...

What does a datacomms rooted company like Diablo (because that's where the founders came from) know about SSDs?

We'll have to see as details emerge later. However, in past conversations I've had with people in enterprise SSD array pioneer Texas Memory Systems (acquired by IBM) - TMS had characterized their big controller SSD architecture as being primarily "a router" which could move data reliably from a SAN into a memory array with low latency, fast throughput and good data integrity.

And another place we've been seeing datacomms concepts entering the SSD market recently is in the field of adaptive DSP and ECC techniques - most explicitly in the nomenclature of controller and IP products from DensBits - whose "memory modem" approach uses the philosophical idea that charge based R/W errors in flash cells can be modeled and managed in similar ways to signal noise in comms circuits.

Who's SMART? (Diablo's flash partner).

If you're not already familir with SMART - a quick summary is to say they are a Top 20 SSD Company, which is a leading supplier in the SAS SSD market, and has its own adaptive R/W flash ECC IP and its own enterprise SSD controllers. SMART doesn't have a PCIe SSD product line. So you might think that was a strange partner choice - but I'll be returning to this question later in this article.

I spoke recently about the market opportunity and technical challenges posed by memory channel SSDs with John Scaramuzzo, President of SMART.

A small part of the article which follows here - is based on that discussion. But most of the article below is based on my own thoughts - inspired by the kind of questions which I know many of you would ask. These speculations are based on my own analysis of the SSD market.

what's different between this and past flash SSDs in DRAM packages?

John and I briefly discussed why you shouldn't confuse memory channel SSDs with past attempts by memory makers to place flash SSDs in DRAM style DIMM packages.

The two best known companies who have gone down that route are Viking and Micron - in whose DRAM compatible flash products the flash is used as a backup for DRAM which triggered into operation by a drop in the power supply. There have also been DIMM flash SSDs which were mounted on the motherboard in a DRAM package - but where the data was connected via another interface such as SATA - and not through the DRAM bus.

Another phrase which SMART likes to use in relation to the Diable technology is "ultra low latency" SSD. John told me the purpose of the ull SSDs was to provide latency an order of magnitude faster than existing PCIe SSDs.

ULL SSDs - PCIe SSD killers or collabrative co-workers?

One question I asked gave me a picture of how the PCIe SSD market might look - even if we rushed ahead and assumed that ULL SSDs were successful beyond the wildest dreans of their creators (which as we'll see later - stretches a lot of assumptions).

I asked - how many inches in physical distance can the memory channel SSD bus be routed? And specifically - can it hop off the motherboard?

John said - no that's not the idea. The current concept is to be operate the same as a DRAM bus.

So I could immediately see 2 levels of segmentation and co-existence with PCIe SSDs - which can occur - even if we assume that every fast server has memory channel SSDs installed.
  • 1st level of market co-existence:- is high performance server clusters - where PCIe SSDs effectively provide the next level of SAN-like data connectivity and fault tolerance functionality using PCIe fabric technology.

    PCIe fabric - sharing data between different physical servers at low latency - is something which PCIe SSDs can do which DRAM memory technology can't (yet).

    One way to think about this is - what's the best way for one memory channel storage accelerated server to talk to another? The answer is via a switched PCIe SSD fabric.
  • 2nd level of market co-existence - is entry level to mid-range server performance.

    For example - in cost sensitive server markets like iSCSI SSDs.

    That's because the memory management technology needed to implement a Diablo-style ull SSD will be more expensive to implement than entry level fast-enough PCIe SSDs - which don't need such fast SSD controllers and don't need RAM caches or nvRAM caches - each of which escalates upwards the floor price of the ull SSD.

    The cheapest fast-enough PCIe SSDs will always be cheaper than the cheapest memory channel SSDs.
That's my analysis of what would happen - even if the new technology was wildly successful.

John also confirmed that he saw these as different markets. And for example - at some future date - when there's an adequate set of industry standards for PCIe SSDs - you can still expect that SMART might bring to market its own family of PCIe SSDs.

For many of you - that's the key message from this article - and you don't need to read any further. I'll say it simply here...

Memory channel SSDs will not remove the need or market desireability of PCIe SSDs.

In extreme cases it's possible to imagine servers in which both types of SSDs are operating (in different functional roles) at the same time. And in my view - the market opportunity for PCIe SSDs will remain much bigger - because it can be adapted more economically for a wider spectrum of performance.

This brings us to the next 2 big questions and problems about bringing ull SSDs to market - flash technology and controller technology

flash technology and ull SSDs

Without giving too many details away John told me that getting the memory technology optimized for the low latency and high IOPS of ull SSDs was going to be a tough challenge.

If you look at the endurance problem for a very fast SSD of this type - the demand pushes you in the direction of SLC like characteristics.

The latency can only be met by true DRAM or nvRAM like memory.

John told me - they weren't in this venture with Diablo only to design a product which worked. The product had to be affordable too. Therefore it has to be flash rich.

If I step back and speculate what performance might be needed in this new type of SSD - it's way beyond what SMART implements in its SAS SSDs.

On the other hand - adaptive R/W flash IP (of the type which SMART has) can be tweaked to deliver SLC-like performance.

And if you look at the rackmount SSD market - Skyera shows you can get very high system performance and reliability by using adaptive R/W alongside nvRAM cache.

In fact - if you look at a technology roadmap for future flash memory and SSDs - it would be a mistake to launch the new memory channel SSDs using an SLC based implementation - because apart from the cost penalties - SLC doesn't have a geometry scalable future. When you shrink it - it picks up all the baggage of problems of MLC. So MLC and adaptive R/W is the only way to go. (That's true for industrial SSDs too - and not just in the enterprise flash market.)

My guess is that Diablo must have realized that when they were looking at the long range memory future. And that's one of the reasons they picked SMART.

SMART is currently one of the leading companies which spans both adaptive R/W technology and has enterprise SSD market experience but doesn't yet have the inconvenient distraction of having a PCIe SSD product line.

SMART's controller performance problem

SMART's current SSD controller technology (as publicly revealed) can simply be described as fast enough for the purposes of 2.5" SSDs - which it was designed for - but nowhere near fast enough compared say to fast PCIe SSDs such as those from Fusion-io, Virident or Micron.

So how's SMART doing to fill the controller gap to deliver fast ull SSDs?

This is my speculation here and not based on anything said to me by anyone in SMART.

But there are several ways you can look at this problem....

Scaling and bundling the technology which aleady exists.

For example OCZ was the first company which demonstrated that you can design very fast throughput PCIe SSDs by using arrays of controllers which had been designed for 2.5" SSDs. In OCZ's case their original PCIe SSDs included arrays of SandForce controllers - and are now available using arrays of their own OCZ controllers.

This approach (using multiple Guardian controllers) would be feasible for SMART to use in new ull SSD too. It would need a fat RAM cache to deal with latency and endurance peaks. But it's not the most efficient solution.

When you get into the fast enterprise SSD club you start seeing controller designs which have similar characteristics.

These big controller designs tend to split the controller design into different partitions - an intelligence and host / apps leaning side and a distributed flash management I/O side.

My guess is that new ull products from SMART could be eASIC or FPGA heavy implementations rather than simply arrays of their Guardian controllers. That's because when you own the algorithms and IP - you aren't tied to past implementations of how you packaged it. You can implement the functions in any way that makes best sense for the market you're going for.

It doesn't really matter which way SMART does it as long as it's fast enough and is affordable.

The host interface and high end memory controller / CPU IP side of things is where it would be natural to assume that Diablo will be contriibuting their own IP.

how successful will memory channel SSDs / ull SSDs be?

This is where we can return to some important strategic speculation.

First of all - in looking at what problem these new SSDs might solve which isn't being solved today - an important thing to realize is that the competitive environment isn't the same as when Fusion-io started shipping PCIe SSDs back in 2007.

The new ull SSDs have to fight for a viable toehold in an already pre-existing and very sophisticated market for enterprise SSDs.

And even though the state of the SSD software leaves many questions open to debate the importance of software in the SSD market as a sales accelerator is well established and well understood - even if mostly by the high sums that such companies have been acquired for - relative to their modest revenue achevements as standalone ISVs.

You can get some interesting insights into this by using the mental trick I call SSD market boundaries analysis and rephrasing some of the assumptions about the new technology to get these sanity checks.
  • if Fusion-io was the flash technology partner for Diablo (instead of SMART - and forgetting about the very material facts that FIO doesn't admit publicly to having the same flash technology and also has a very different approach to everyone else when it comes to SSD controller design) what could Fusion-io deliver with a memory channel connected SSD that it can't already deliver with a PCIe SSD?

    FIO has demonstrated in market shipping products that shrinking down latency requires more than hardware design.

    You need to remove layers of hard drive related junk which is hard coded into many layers of enterprise systems software. But when you do this - sometimes by introducing new side-stepping APIs - you can get apps performance which is 10x faster than raw speedup which you get from simply running legacy software faster on SSDs.

    This is something which academic researches at the Non Volatile Systems Lab UCSD have also written about too.

    Fusion-io is already well down this learning curve - and if they had the benefits of a lower latency to memory technology - my guess is they would be best placed to further exploit it. Having said that, however, until we know what the Diablo/SMART memory channel controller latency delivers - we can't be sure how it will compare to what FIO already delivers with the worse latency of PCIe but better latency of a flash translation layer in which the apps server is the same CPU that manages the flash.
  • if SMART were simply to come to market with a new fast PCIe SSD (instead of a new type of SSD) it would struggle and probably fail to establish a market for such a product. If and when SMART does introduce its own PCIe SSD my guess is it would be a fast-enough product optimized for cost and efficiency rather than speed. But that's another story.

    Without a software base - simply having a lower latency PCIe SSD wouldn't get you many customers today.
The memory channel SSD concept - if the product is fast enough and affordable - will find a market if it can exceed the kind of server cost / performance which you can only get today by using Fusion-io's PCIe SSDs with Fusion-io's APIs - but in a business model which is independent of Fusion-io.

One of the problems for the Diablo / SMART ull SSD market is the lack of a spohisticated SSD ecosystem. That's a problem which faces any new type of SSD. My guess is that a critical part of Diablo's business model will have to be invested in showing how the new SSD type can side step those difficult "SSD" type integration questions - by delivering a product which looks to applications transparently like a bigger cheaper type of DRAM.

The idea of selling flash as a memory tier has long been on the agenda of leading PCIe SSD companies like Fusion-io and Virident - but the physics of flash and the characteristics of the the interface have meant that it's not been possible to do this without a lot of software being introduced into the mix. And the enterprise market is traditionally cautious about relying on single source solutions.

So - who are the first customers for these new ull SSDs likely to be?

Until the first products come to market we have to guess at their possible characteristics.

If you've been following my flow until now - my guess is the first memory channel SSDs will need to be fast SSD with apps acceleration in a similar class to using Fusion-io PCIe SSDs (and APIs).

But the memory channel SSDs will have a completely different software architecture. The possibilities range from a very light software support set in which the new SSDs are initiated in the server to look like a big RAM. Or maybe some SSD-like software in which the modules look like a traditional SAS drive.

Or the details may be completely different.

Who would be the ideal customers for such products? - It's going to be very tech savvie customers for whom pushing the boundaries of performance is worth the risk of investing in new technology because they use or sell thousands of servers. So it will be dark matter SSD users, SSD appliance makers and traditional server oems.

conclusion

It's always fun to speculate about the likely impact of new SSD technologies and changes in market directions.

As the above article is mostly based on speculating about a single new product line it's almost certain that in many detailed respects it will be wrong.

Nevertheless I think that the safe conclusion - which is almost where I started - is that even if memory channel / ull SSDs are successful in the market there are many ways to see how in the next 2-3 years they can still coexist with several different types of PCIe SSDs.

For related info see these articles and guides:-

PCIe SSDs news
RAM market news
SSD controllers and flash IP
PCIe SSDs aren't all the same
glue chips and IP in the SSD market
an introduction to enterprise SSD silos

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It looks like you're seriously interested in SSDs. So please bookmark this page and come back again soon.

If you've got the time - you might want to take a look at the top 100 most popular SSD articles seen by our readers in recent months.
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About the publisher - 21 years guiding the enterprise market
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SSD news headlines
Samsung shipping 11 DWPD SATA SSDs
Skyera unifies 19nm MLC arrays with 100x life
Stec's profiler removes guesswork sizing SSD caches
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"Old, heavily written MLC cells - managed by traditional endurance schemes - can get slower as they get older - due to higher retry rates on reads - even though the blocks are still reported by the controller logs as being good. That means the SSD's performance can degrade significantly after a few years."
SSD endurance - the forever war

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SSD ad - click for more info

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Usable versus Raw - in SSD capacity - isn't the only flash in most SSDs - a significant proportion of flash can be Invisible. Ever wondered what it's doing? And is it a good or bad thing?
SSD capacity - the iceberg syndrome


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7 years ago - in - SSD market history
Samsung Ships Revolutionary SSD Based Notebooks

Editor:- May 23, 2006 - Samsung today launched the world's first high volume consumer PCs embedded with a 32GB flash-based solid state disk.

The Samsung Q1 ($2,430 - 900MHz processor, 7" screen) and the Q30 ($3,700 - 1.2GHz processor, 12" screen) will be available in the Korean market in a few weeks.

These mobile computing devices are the ideal solution for professionals and executives who are constantly on the move. The SSD reads 300% faster (53MB/s) and writes 150% quicker (28MB/s) than normal hard drives. As a result, multiple application programs can operate simultaneously and large volumes of data can be edited and reproduced more efficiently. The Microsoft Windows XP operating system will boot up 25-50% faster on the SSD than on other drives.

The Q1-SSD will show video or still photos as well as play audio without having to be booted up first. DMB TV receivers are embedded in both PCs, which will bring extra enjoyment to users during this summer's World Cup competition.

"PC models based on solid state disks have numerous advantages over traditional hard disk-based models. These include faster booting, greater durability, quieter operation, and increased battery life. These new models are only the beginning. Samsung will continue to lead the market, introducing new portable PC models that bring these benefits to both consumers and enterprise users." said Kim Hounsoo, Executive VP of the Computing Division of Samsung Electronics.

Editor's comments:-
this market changing use for SSDs was described in our SSD market penetration model published last year - which described all the main applications and trigger points for the SSD market along with their user value propositions.


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"Doing old things better with new SSDs will become a smaller part of the totality of what needs to be done in data processing in the future."
Editor:- (May 3,2013) - part of a reply to an investor who was asking about old style big name storage companies.


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memory channel SSDs

non volatile memory as a tier

etc - more related reading

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"Much of the prior work in SSDs has treated SSDs as fast disks. Diablo's MCS takes a fundamentally different approach, and enables SSDs to look more like memory."
Our Flash Memory Investment in Diablo (November 2012) - blog by Alex Benik, Battery Ventures (whose many other investments also included adaptive R/W SSD controller trailblazer - Anobit)

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"This really changes everything. The convergence of Diablo's groundbreaking MCS technology and our award-winning Guardian Technology is not just about re-architecting storage, but re-architecting the integration of servers, storage and Flash acceleration.
Diablo and SMART partnership joint press release - (April 24, 2013)

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"Fast non-volatile memories will soon make their appearance on the processor memory bus. They offer the potential for extremely low-latency, high-bandwidth access to persistent files. However, existing interfaces will impose large system call and file system overheads on those accesses, squandering the memories performance."
Quill: Exploiting Fast Non-Volatile Memory by Transparently Bypassing the File System (pdf) - Part of the growing SSD literature output coming out from - NVSL ( the Non-Volatile Systems Lab at UCSD).

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"SSDs, have an identity crisis. They are clearly not drives in the conventional sense of slow, spinning hard disk drives. Yet SSDs look like drives to system designers because they retain legacy disk interfaces and rely on disk protection schemes designed in the 1980s specifically for high-capacity, slow I/O mechanical disks."
Going Beyond SSD: The Fusion Software Defined Flash Memory Approach - is a paper by Fusion-io. It was probably written a long time ago - but I only saw it recently.

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"The 'radical' innovation in the host-attached flash storage marketplace today comes from products that not only access flash through a PCIe connection, but also bypass storage protocols to drive new levels of performance and enable new functionality not previously imagined. To achieve this, existing technologies must be left behind..."
Innovation and FlashMAX with Virident's vFAS (July 2012) - blog by Jeff Sosa Director of Product Management, Virident Systems

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"Up until now, volatile DRAM was the only media that could communicate directly with the microprocessors memory controller. This partnership (between SMART and Diablo) allows us to connect Flash as persistent storage directly to the memory controller."
SMART's blog - re Diablo partnership and New Era of Flash Storage (April 25, 2013) - blog by John Scaramuzzo, President, SMART Storage Systems

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"In the past decade we've seen that the only technology which could realistically threaten to displace an SSD from its established market role was yet another SSD."
the Modern Era of SSDs

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"In an ideal world - symmetry considerations would be on page 1 of the - how to design an SSD cookbook."
11 key symmetries in SSD design architecture

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"The risk of data corruption from power cycling isn't a random, unforseeable event. It's a direct result of choices made (or not made) when that SSD was designed... "
Surviving SSD sudden power loss

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"Back in 2003 all enterprise acceleration SSDs were RAM SSDs. Now 99% of enterprise SSDs are flash. But what kind of flash?"
sugaring flash for the enterprise

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"...the SSD market will be bigger in revenue than the hard drive market ever was."
How will hard drives fare in an SSD world?

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"Don't believe everything SSD companies tell you about the past, present or future of the SSD market."
Survivor's Guide to Enterprise SSDs

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"Knowing the memory type in the SSD doesn't tell you anything useful about the SSD's likely characteristics and limitations any more... "
Recent Strategic Transitions in SSD

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"You'd think... someone should know all the answers by now. "
what do enterprise SSD users want?

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"Little words can have with big meanings in the world of SSDs. They affect price, performance, reliability and user happiness."
flash SSD jargon explained

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Beware the distorting lens of viewpoint
as in - "SSDs are similar to..."
Can you trust SSD market data?

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"When it comes to fault tolerance - you have to analyze SSDs as data systems devices and not as electronic components."
FITs - reliability abstraction levels in SSD modeling

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"despite the bewildering range of products in the market - the performance characteristics and limitations of ALL flash SSDs are determined by a small set of of architectural parameters."
a toolkit for understanding flash SSD performance characteristics and limitations

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SSD ad - click for more info

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"Little words can have with big meanings in the world of SSDs. They affect price, performance, reliability and user happiness."
flash SSD jargon explained

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"Unfortunately whether you love or hate animal brands - within the context of the SSD market at least - it seems like all the best ones have already been taken."
Inanimate power, speed and strength metaphors in SSD brands