Cloud service providers offer a range of storage services to enterprises, such as block storage and object storage. Currently, more data is being created, stored, and analyzed than ever before. Cloud service providers tend to extend storage capacity to meet the requirement of high-growth technologies, such as big data analytics, real-time databases, and high-performance computing. All these technologies require not only high performance but also ever-expanding data volumes.

At SNIA SDC 2022, we introduced Cloud Storage Acceleration Layer (CSAL), a host based FTL deployed at scale at Alibaba, which doubled VM density and cut time to insight in half in their cloud services. To deliver these technology benefits to more customers, we released CSAL to open source in SPDK v22.09 and at SNIA SDC 2023 we are announcing a reference design published on the SPDK website. With Intel winding down Optane and the increased availability of dense QLC SSDs, the need for CSAL has increased. Accordingly, Solidigm has acquired the CSAL technology and development team.