Heterogeneous Architectures for Implementation of High-capacity Hyper-converged Storage Devices

Latest trends in software defined storage indicate emergence of hyper-convergence where compute networking and storage are combined within one device. In this talk, we introduce a novel architecture to implement such a node in one device. The unique features include a combination of ARM-processors for control plane functionality and dataflow architectures in FPGAs to handle data processing. We leverage a novel hybrid memory system mixing NVMe drives and DRAM to deliver a multi-terabyte object store with 10Gbps access bandwidth. Finally, network connectivity is accelerated by leveraging a full TCP/IP endpoint dataflow implementation within the FPGA’s programmable fabric. A first proof-of-concept deploys Xilinx Ultrascale+ MPSoC to demonstrate feasibility of a single-chip solution that can produce unprecedented levels of performance (13M requests per second) and storage capacity (2TB) at minimal power consumption (