Your typical SSD is very badly behaved with regard to latency. Background tasks interfere with I/O requests. As drives increase in size beyond a typical working set, multiple users interfere with each other (noisy neighbor). Scale out systems such as those assembled by Hyperscalers, are not tolerant of today’s long tail of SSD latency. In order to address these requirements, the storage industry through the NVM Express standard is adding some new features. This talk will explain those features and how they address these issues.

Two key trends are driving the need for computational SSDs. The first trend is the data-heavy nature of modern workloads. The best machine learning algorithms will perform poorly in the absence of large amounts of high quality data. Similarly, analytics weather video, log or database all require a massive amount of data. The second key trend is the diversity of compute workloads like machine learning, big data analytics, and streaming video in the modern datacenter, none of which are a great fit for the CPU instruction set.

The latest Intel innovation extends Intel® 3DXPoint™ media, combining great features found in both DRAM and NAND SSDs. This innovative new solution, will move larger amount of data closer to the CPU, so that it can be accessed, processed, and analyzed in real-time. In storage applications along with Optane SSD will help break storage and caching bottlenecks, enabling faster performance and increasing scalability. Intel Optane will also be used to replace or extend the DRAM memory pool, enabling more affordable deployments and significantly larger data sets.

With the release of the world’s first QLC SSD, the Micron 5210 ION, Micron’s team has been developing ways to further maximise its value with different workloads and enterprise applications. The Micron 5210 SSD is optimised for read intensive workloads which is widely used in Business intelligence and decision support systems (BI/DSS) on Microsoft SQL Server. That is where the value of QLC SSDs really shines. In this presentation, I’ll present how combining 5210-ION QLC SSD together with NVDIMM-N will deliver more system level performance over traditional configurations.

Today all the EDSFF family of form factors share the same protocol (NVMe), the same interface (PCIe), the same edge connector (SFF-TA-1002), and the same pinout and functions (SFF-TA-1009). There is a vast diversity of Enterprise and Datacenter applications. This presentation, from the 2020 OCP Summit, explains how having a flexible and scalable family of form factors allows for optimization for different use cases, different media types on SSDs, scalable performance, and improved data center TCO. the specification.

NVM Express® technology is driving the next generation of SSDs for data centers. NVMe® SSDs are not limited by legacy form factors or protocols, and they can better address the needs of servers and storage in enterprise and hyperscale data centers. With the varied and dedicated use cases for NVMe SSDs, there are two classifications that generally define and segment these classes: Enterprise and Data Center.

Here at Micron, we've been analyzing the effect NVIDIA GPU Direct Storage (GDS) can have on storage I/O in GPU enabled system. In this session we discuss why this technology is important, the performance improvements from using GDS, and an exciting new architecture for datacenter NVMe-Ethernet-attached Bunch Of Flash (EBOF) for NVMe Over Fabrics (NVMe-oF).