Current Filter: Storage>>>>>Technology Focus>

   

With an ever-growing gap between application performance requirements and hard disk drive (HDD) capabilities, PCIe-based SSDs are becoming highly desirable and represent a fast-growing multi-billion dollar global opportunity over the next five years. At present, PCIe SSD deployments are at an adoption stage (see Figure 1), but forecast is to achieve an estimated 2.75x growth in units shipped over the next 5 years according to TrendFocus market research. To achieve these forecasted deployment levels, new technologies must be developed that standardise and unify the storage stack, eliminate the existing proprietary driver model, and create a serviceable package.

REVOLUTION IN THE DATA CENTRE
Up to now, most SSDs are using a SATA-, SAS- or PCI-Express-Bus interface to connect with the PC system. In down-market the SATA interface for SSDs was the most common, although it was originally developed for mechanical HDDs and therewith not as powerful as needed for high performance SSDs. SATA became the bottleneck for the SSD performance.

Opportunities continue to unfold in the enterprise for flash-based solid-state storage as it provides faster I/O performance than hard disk storage, supports large capacities and a variety of form factors and interfaces, and consumes less power to address the astronomical amount of data stored within enterprises and by client users.

"There are several good interfaces available for enterprise SSDs but PCIe has become one of the best," says Tobias Obeloer, Field Application Engineer at OCZ Storage Solutions. "Its direct connection to the host CPU provides 'near-zero' latency. The current PCIe 3.0 version provides up to 1GB/s of bandwidth per lane enabling PCIe SSDs to use 4 or 8 lanes concurrently, equating to 4GB/s or 8GB/s of achievable bandwidth from each device."

Today's enterprise servers have several PCIe slots available for SSD deployment and can accommodate up to 40 lanes of PCIe per CPU. A two-socket server can support 80 lanes of PCIe. With an ongoing performance gap between server processors and HDD subsystems, PCIe-SSDs are highly desirable and represent a fast-growing multi-billion dollar global opportunity over the next five years. At present, PCIe SSD deployments are at introductory levels.

"To achieve these expected deployment levels, PCIe required a host-controlled interface standard. Without this, each SSD vendor has to develop their own proprietary drivers on how the SSD will interface with the host", says Obeloer. "By standardising the interface, only one driver development is required. As such, the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) specification was created to deliver the full potential of non-volatile memory for enterprise and client platforms in support of PCIe-based SSDs."

The NVMe host control interface allows for both system builders and storage vendors alike to develop the different parts of a storage ecosystem to the same specification enabling broad interoperability between storage devices, host platforms and supporting software. NVMe is an ongoing development effort coordinated through an open industry consortium of over 90 members under the direction of a 13-company promoter group.

Page   1  2