The Next Frontier in NVM Performance

 August 10, 2011, Flash Memory Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Knut Grimsrud from Intel discussed the next frontier in SSDs. The industry is moving towards new approaches to connectivity and system software to enable order of magnitude improvements in performance.

In small data centers, HDDs are being replaced with SSDs resulting in a 20 times reduction in the number of drives and associated power. The challenge is to find the next 20 X in performance where the nonvolatile memory achieves greater than 1 million IOPS. One example of the data needs driving these increases is 300 simultaneous full resolution, full frame videos generating 1 GB per second in random I/O.

Enablers for this level of performance include changing interfaces from SAS to PCIe, which can operate at over 6 GB per second. Change the logical interface to NVMe with integrated hardware automation for higher performance. And design streamlines storage stacks for low latency and overhead.

Another issue is the client focus on power. Storage needs very short times to move from off or resting states to active to enable power reductions. The target is a low-power state of five mill Watts and a activation time under 50 ms. These numbers minimize “resume latency” and lost time and wake up. In addition, the SATA interface needs to change to improve transitions in and out of low-power states.

A hybrid storage organization offers both speed and capacity for the enterprise. Moving to PCIe interfaces will improve transfer bandwidth and changes to bios and drivers will improve performance even more. The first 20 times improvement in performance came when enterprises shifted to SSDs. The next 20 times improvement in performance and power will come from changes in the physical and logical management areas.