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NVMdurance was
founded in Ireland in
2013 when the
ADAPT project was spun out of the National Digital Research Centre in Ireland.
The technology is the result of
13 years' work
(pdf) on flash memory endurance by Joe Sullivan
and Conor Ryan.
SSDs using non-volatile memory are rapidly taking over from hard disks. However
SSDs wear out and this is holding back their complete replacement of hard disks.
NVMdurance' trials with leading manufacturers have proven to significantly
extend the life of SSDs. NVMdurance has offices in Limerick, Ireland and San
Jose, California. |
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| see also:-
NVMdurance
- mentions on StorageSearch.com,
NVMdurance software
page |
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| Who's who
in SSD? - NVMdurance | |
by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - StorageSearch.com
- May 23, 2016 |
On a handful of occasions in more than
20 years
writing about the SSD market I've spoken to companies which I known
instinctively would change the way that the whole market thinks about itself.
NVMdurance is one of those companies.
While we have seen many
companies in the past 5 years telling us about the different ways in which their
technologies can leverage the mysterious
elasticity of
flash endurance
in an SSD controller
context - most of those have leveraged combinations of techniques such as
adaptive R/W pulse modication,
DSP ECC,
and big controller
application or array awareness which become so closely tied to a particular
product line or application space that the benefits derived from each element in
the mix cannot be easily or quickly extracted and migrated to other
applications.
NVMdurance has created a multigenerational and
sustainable characterization methodology which - when applied to any
kind of flash -and with the use of a lightweight firmware manager - enables
endurance to be restated with a useful magnification effect (of x7 to x10)
which is accomplished without the use of processor intensive DSP techniques -
but which can be used as a restated foundation level of endurance which can
then be used in conjunction with other proprietary endurance stretching
techniques.
A simple way to state the market effect is like this.
All
MLC or TLC nand flash - whether 2D or 3D - can now be thought of as having 2
endurance ratings:-
- the standard model rating of endurance, and also
- the improved NVMdurance model rating of endurance (metascale advised,
life-cycle fitted, virtually hardened flash endurance).
Most of the
software based tricks which can be usefully applied to standard endurance can
still be used (if required) taking the improved NVMdurance base level of
endurance as the new starting point.
Therefore what you have - in
effect - is a much greater pool of memory types.
SSD designers in
the NVMdurance era now have greater freedom to use simpler, lower power
controllers and cheaper (worse standard endurance flash) to get
DWPD ratings which
hitherto would have required more power hungry controllers or more expensive
memory (or rare inhouse flash controller talent).
Part of the
NVMdurance technology story is evolutionary but another part (the business
model and the disruptive market impact of its brute force systematic offline
characterization techniques) is revolutionary. I'll be saying more about those
in a follow up
article. |
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In August 2013 -
startup NVMdurance's
endurance stretching characterization software was
judged
to be one of the most innovative flash memory technologies seen at the
Flash Memory Summit.
In
June 2015
- Altera announced
availability of an FPGA flash controller reference design IP for NVMe PCIe
SSDs which used NAND life extension software from
NVMdurance.
In
March 2016
- NVMdurance
announced a $2.5 million Series A round of financing. |
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Back in the early 1990s it
was not uncommon to hear about specialist server companies which were using
peltier effect heat sinks to refrigerate the fastest workstation processors so
they could run at higher clock speeds.
One of the biggest
bottlenecks in the past decade has been RAM architecture and DRAM implementation
itself. |
| cool runnings - Rambus
to coach faster DRAM (April 2017) | | |
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SLC / MLC / TLC - tactical
/ permanent / real / virtual?
If you've ever wondered about how to
optimize SSD design by using a mix of flash memory types in the same SSD then
this paper is an invaluable reference guide to the techniques which have been
written about in the public domain. |
| tradeoffs in the design
of mixed flash hybrid SSDs (December 2017) | | |
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SSD news
some limericks
inspired by the NVMdurance story
what were
the big SSD ideas which emerged in 2016? /
2017?
the
upsides and downsides of hold-up caps in MIL SSDs
miscellaneous
consequences of the 2017 memory shortages
DRAM's
indeterminate latencies and the virtual memory slider mix
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| NVMdurance
has US patent for Adaptive Flash Tuning |
Editor:- March 21, 2017 - NVMdurance today
announced
that it has been granted US patent 9,569,120 for Adaptive Flash Tuning.
This
patent covers NVMdurance's
Pathfinder and
Navigator software, which discover optimal flash trim sets for the target
application and implement a set of optimization techniques that constantly
monitor the NAND flash health and autonomically adjusts the operating parameters
in real time.
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| new funding for endurance
stretching NVMdurance |
Editor:- March 29 , 2016 - NVMdurance
recently announced
it has completed a $2.5 million Series A round of financing. Existing investors
New Venture Partners, ACT Venture Capital, Enterprise Ireland and NDRC have
invested bringing total funding to $2.77 million.
"This
financing builds on an exceptional year from NVMdurance which saw its first
customer announcement with
Altera (now part of
Intel)" said Steve Socolof
of New Venture Partners LLC. "The NVMdurance software increases the number
of program-erase cycles in Altera's FPGA-based storage reference design by up to
7x times compared to existing NAND flash implementations."
Editor's
comments:- NVMdurance says the power behind its endurance stretching IP is
the use of offline machine learning software that automatically learns the
optimal parameter settings for the NAND device. | | |
... |
"Flash memory
based SSDs suffer the indeterminate delay inserted by the Flash Translation
Layer in its production of the of physical block addresses.
This is
one reason that All-Flash-Array architects like Pure Storage desire additional
physical control at the Flash Translation Layer.
Additional storage
system functions such as deduplication, compression, error coding, power-on
fill, data recovery ops, check pointing, and scrubbing are further accelerated
by this approach." |
| Alan Niebel
, CEO - Web-Feet
Research (January
16, 2017) in his
blog
announcing a new annual edition of the company's SSD market reports "NVMe
now, NVDIMM coming ". | | |
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