15 High-Performance Flash Solutions From The Flash Memory Summit

Highlights From The Flash Memory Summit Conference

The annual Flash Memory Summit, held earlier this month, was an opportunity to see and understand the flash storage trends that will impact storage performance in data centers for years to come.

The conference was also an opportunity for storage vendors to show off the latest hardware and software components, as well as new all-flash arrays and other new technology, that are helping flash storage accelerate a wide range of customer workloads and rapidly become accepted as a mainstream storage medium.

Didn't get to Santa Clara, Calif., to attend the event? Missed some of the vendors? You are in luck. Turn the page and join CRN for a look at some of the 15 new products and solutions from vendors large and small.

AccelStor Demos High-performance All-Flash Array

AccelStor used the Flash Memory Summit to demonstrate high-sustained IOPS with its FlexiRemap software-defined flash technology. The Taiwan-based company said a high-density, 2U solution running FlexiRemap offers up to 680,000 IOPS for 4-KB random writes, while its upcoming NeoSapphire 3413 all-flash array offers sustained 600,000 IOPS with 24 hot-swappable SSDs, including two SSDs for hot spares.

AccelStor also showed its upcoming NeoGarnet hybrid storage arrays with PCIe SSDs and Toshiba enterprise hard drives.

FlexiRemap is a software-defined flash technology developed by AccelStor for profound flash acceleration at the OS kernel level.

During FMS 2015, AccelStor demonstrated FlexiRemap on a high-density 2U rack-mount platform, reaching over 680,000 IOPS for 4-KB random write, and also reveal the key technical details of its upcoming flagship NeoSapphire 3413 all-flash array, achieving sustained 600,000 IOPS with 24 hot-swappable SSDs, including two for hot spares.

BitMicro's New MAXio Z-series SSDs

BitMicro Networks, Fremont, Calif., unveiled its new MAXio Z-Series full-height PCIe SSDs, featuring the company's in-house Talino flash controllers based on its own Talino ASIC architecture.

BitMicro's MAXio Z-Series SSDs support storage capacities of up to 8.8 TB in a PCIe edge card form factor. They include the company's DriveLight Management Software with easy-to-use, interactive features the company said allows simplified administration.

BitMicro is targeting its MAXio Z-Series PCIe SSDs at such enterprise workloads as video on demand, database acceleration, online analytics, file servers, cloud services and virtualization.

Diablo Technologies All-Flash DDR4 Modules

Ottawa-based Diablo Technologies introduced Memory1, which it called the first commercially viable all-flash DDR4 system memory modules.

Memory1 modules are deployed into standard DDR4 DIMM slots to provide applications with the ability to leverage large pools of local memory. The modules take advantage of Diablo’s memory-channel architecture to let the flash capacity interface directly with the DDR bus, providing four times the capacity of the largest DRAM modules while reducing cost by up to 70 percent.

Memory1 is currently shipping to a few customers, and is slated to be broadly available next quarter.

IP-Maker Unveils NVMe Controller IP

IP-Maker, an Aix-en-Provence, France-based startup developer of storage controller technology, used the Flash Memory Summit to introduce its new PCIe Gen3-capable NVMe controller intellectual property IP.

The NVMe controller IP from IP-Maker is available as a VerilogIP to be integrated in both FPGA and ASIC solutions. Its internal scalable architecture supports PCIe Gen2 and Gen3 configurations with up to eight lanes. The company claims its PCIe Gen3 configuration will provide a big boost in performance in terms of IOPS and latency, with a latency of only 6 to 7 microseconds.

Lite-On's NVMe SSDs

Fremont, Calif.-based Lite-On Technology unveiled the latest generation of its EP series of SSDs, which feature the NVMe protocol.

Lite-On’s EP2 NVMe PCIe SSDs combine the NVMe protocol with Lite-On's customized firmware to deliver random-read performance of up to 250,000 IOPS and random-write performance of 25,000 IOPS with latencies as low as 35 microseconds. They also feature power-loss protection, scalability, end-to-end data protection, low power consumption, and high endurance for such environments and application workloads as online transaction processing, financial transactions, e-commerce, SQL logging, collaboration and email servers, the company said.

Mellanox Flash and Non-Volatile RAM Solutions

Mellanox Technologies, Sunnyvale, Calif., unveiled a number of new technologies the company claims will provide customers with greater access to Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technology to help accelerate applications and more quickly analyze data. These included a new Spectrum 10/25/40/50/100-Gb Ethernet switch, the ConnectX-4 100-Gb VPI (Virtual Protocol Interconnect) adapter and the ConnectX-4 Lx 25/50-Gb Ethernet adapter.

The company also worked with partners on solutions for solid-state storage, including NVMe Over Fabrics network access to different NVMe devices using both RDMA Over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and InfiniBand; iSCSI over RDMA (iSER) access to a flash array; and NVRAM replication over a RDMA network.

Micron Technology Partners With Intel, Seagate On Flash

Boise, Idaho-based Micron Technology said it is now shipping new 3-D NAND technology it developed with Intel. The company also worked with Intel to develop 3-D XPoint flash technology, which it claims features 1,000 times the speed and 100 times the endurance of NAND while offering 10 times the density of conventional memory.

Micron also showed off its new S600 series of SAS SSDs developed with partner Seagate.

The 3-D NAND technology is available, while the 3-D XPoint technology and S600 series SSDs are not yet available.

NetApp Shows Off New Sub-$25K All-Flash Array

NetApp, Sunnyvale, Calif., showed off its new All Flash FAS (AFF) 8000 array series, which leverages the company's NetApp Data ONTAP storage operating system to ensure compatibility with its entire FAS solution line.

There are four models in the new AFF8000 family, all of which have a maximum raw capacity of up to 4.6 petabytes in an all-NAS configuration, or 1.5 petabytes in an all-SAN configuration. The primary difference is the amount of memory and the maximum number of 10-Gbit Ethernet ports and PCIe slots available.

The AFF8000 is available with a starting street price of $25,000, which includes dual controllers, 5 TB of raw capacity, and the same software included with all NetApp arrays.

OCZ Unveils NVMe-Compliant SSDs

OCZ, San Jose, Calif., which early this year was acquired by Toshiba, highlighted its new Z-Drive 6000 PCIe series of NVMe-compliant SSDs. The 6000 series features dual-port capabilities, which allows two host systems to concurrently access data from the same storage device.

The Z-Drive 6000 includes 2.5-inch small-form-factor drives, which utilize 16-channel NAND flash controller technology, and supports the PCIe Gen. 3.0 x4 host interface for high bandwidth, high IOPS and low latency. They support up to 3.2 TB of usable capacity.

OCZ said its Z-Drive 6000 SSD portfolio targets compute-intensive, analytical, online transactional, and cloud-based enterprise applications requiring high-performance and low-latency I/O responses.

Oracle Shows All-Flash Engineered System

The All-Flash Oracle FS1 Storage System is an all-flash array that comes preintegrated with Oracle Database and applications to offer flash performance, capacity scaling and flash provisioning when used with simultaneous mixed workloads, such as online transaction processing and backup, in cloud deployments. It features up to 64 all-flash domains for secure data isolation in multitenant or cloud environments, as well as I/O prioritization based on business value.

The solution supports hundreds of Oracle databases and tenants in all-flash storage, and offers compression of data of up to 50:1. The solution scales to nearly 1 PB of flash capacity, and can go from pallet to power-on in less than 30 minutes, according to Oracle.

PernixData Shows Off High-Performance Storage Software

PernixData, San Jose, Calif., used the Flash Memory Summit to talk about its PernixData FVP software, which the company said puts storage intelligence into high-speed server media. PernixData adds hypervisor clustering, topology-aware fault tolerance, read-and-write acceleration, and seamless support for any shared block-and-file storage systems.

The PernixData FVP software nondisruptively deploys inside a hypervisor kernel in under 10 minutes, and provides seamless virtual machine migrations within an FVP cluster. Those virtual machines can remotely access data on server-side flash or RAM for continued acceleration. The software supports read-and-write acceleration with fault tolerance.

PMC-Sierra Intros NVMe, PCIe Tech To Speed SSD Performance

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based PMC-Sierra unveiled what it termed the industry’s first PCIe storage switches and the world’s fastest SSD controllers. SSDs based on PMC's new second-generation Flashes NVMe controllers can deliver 1 million IOPS and over 20 TB of flash capacity. To enable the pooling of such high-performance, low-latency drives, the company also unveiled its new Switches PS PCIe storage switches. These switches let PCIe-SSD-based systems scale with resiliency, programmability and advanced diagnostics. Together, Switches PCIe storage switches and Flashes PCIe controllers provide an end-to-end solution.

SanDisk SSDs Target Cloud Service Providers, Software-Defined Storage

Milpitas, Calif.-based SanDisk unveiled its new Cloud Speed Ultra Gen. II SATA SSD for cloud service provider and software-defined storage vendor environments. The new SSDs offer up to 1.6 TB of usable capacity, and are targeted at mixed-use, latency-sensitive transactional workloads, such as e-commerce and collaborative online services. They feature a cost-point at just over 4 cents per IOPS, and serve up to 32,000 4-KB write IOPS with 530 MBps throughput and an 80-microsecond random-read-write latency.

Seagate Intros SAS SSDs

Cupertino, Calif.-based hard drive and SSD manufacturer Seagate, showed its 1200.2 SAS SSDs, the first result of its strategic alliance with Micron Technology. The new drives offer up to 3.2 million IOPS and 20 GBps speed in a 92-TB array, all in a single Seagate OneStor SP3224s 2U enclosure.

The new drives feature a 12-Gbps SAS interface for dual-channel throughput with up to 1,800 MBps sequential reads and multiple endurance choices within a single hardware and firmware design.

Toshiba SSDs For Wide Range Of Workloads

The Storage Products Business Unit of Irvine, Calif.-based Toshiba America Electronic Components unveiled its next generation of enterprise SSDs. The new PX04S line features four dual-ported 12-Gbps SAS SSD models with random 4-KB block performance offering read speed of up to 270,000 IOPS, write speed of up to 125,000 IOPS and up to 3.84 TB of operating capacity.

The four models include the PX04SHB, which targets high-endurance requirements with support for 25 complete drive writes per day; the PX04SMB, which offers 10 drive writes per day with performance suitable for online transaction processing; the PX04SVB, which is optimized for read-intensive server and storage applications; and the PX04SRB, which is targeted at read-intensive applications.