FPGA-Based NVM Express Flash Storage Cards in the Data Center

Ravi Thummarukudy, Mobiveil, Inc.
EETimes (4/15/2015 02:55 PM EDT)

The advent of FPGA-based flash storage cards enables data centers to customize their solution for maximum performance, storage capacity, and flash durability.

Social media, electronic commerce, and over-the-top consumption of video and audio content are radically changing the data center, which had been defined by its hardware components in the past. Today, the data center is rapidly becoming racks of commodity hardware components configured by software. One component benefiting from this change is solid-state storage in the form of flash memory. Internet giants such as Facebook, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, LinkedIn, and others have opted to create their data centers from racks of commodity server blades tied to massive storage farms. Linking the two is high speed interconnect transporting continuous torrents of data that steadily grows over time. This is where flash becomes important.

To process this data more effectively, the storage hierarchy of the data center server and its associated disk farm has changed to include an additional layer of high-speed non-volatile memory (NVM) solid-state storage to mask the rotational latency of disk drives. According to market research firm IHS iSuppli, new enterprise products ranging from drives to caches to (disk) arrays have led to integration of solid state drives (SSD) into corporate storage architecture. IHS iSuppli says SSD shipments grew 50 percent in 2014 and predicts them to reach 189.6 million units in 2017 -- close to half the size of the predicted hard disk drive (HDD) market of 397 million units that same year.

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