Silicon Movement Demonstrates Versatile Knowledge Placement on MonTitan Gen 5 Enterprise SSD Platform

At FMS 2024, the technological necessities from the storage and reminiscence subsystem took coronary coronary heart stage. Each SSD and controller distributors had totally different demonstrations touting their suitability for quite a few ranges of the AI data pipeline – ingestion, preparation, instructing, checkpointing, and inference. Distributors like Solidigm have quite a few types of SSDs optimized for quite a few ranges of the pipeline. On the an equivalent time, controller distributors have taken benefit of one in all many decisions launched lately contained in the NVM Categorical commonplace – Versatile Knowledge Placement (FDP).

FDP consists of the host offering data / hints relating to the areas the place the controller might place the incoming write data to have the power to within the discount of the write amplification. These hints are generated based mostly on specific block sizes marketed by the machine. The function is totally backwards-compatible, with non-FDP hosts working merely as ahead of with FDP-enabled SSDs, and vice-versa.

Silicon Movement’s MonTitan Gen 5 Enterprise SSD Platform was launched as soon as extra in 2022. Since then, Silicon Movement has been touting the pliability of the platform, permitting its purchasers to include their very private decisions as a part of the customization course of. This system is frequent contained in the enterprise residence, as we have now seen with Marvell’s Bravera SC5 SSD controller contained in the DapuStor SSDs and Microchip’s Flashtec controllers contained in the Longsys FORESEE enterprise SSDs.

At FMS 2024, the corporate was demonstrating some great benefits of versatile data placement by permitting a single QLC SSD based mostly on their MonTitan platform to participate in quite a few ranges of the AI data pipeline whereas sustaining the required fine quality of service (minimal bandwidth) for every course of. The corporate even has a trademarked title (PerformaShape) for the firmware function contained in the controller that permits the isolation of assorted concurrent SSD accesses (from completely completely totally different ranges contained in the AI data pipeline) to verify this QoS. Silicon Movement claims that this scheme will allow its purchasers to get the utmost write effectivity potential from QLC SSDs with out negatively impacting the effectivity of assorted varieties of accesses.

Silicon Movement and Phison have market administration inside the consumer SSD controller market with related approaches. Nonetheless, their enterprise SSD controller selling could not be additional completely completely totally different. Whereas Phison has gone in for a turnkey resolution with their Gen 5 SSD platform (to the extent of not adopting the white label route for this era, and as a substitute opting to get the SSDs licensed with completely completely totally different cloud service suppliers themselves), Silicon Movement is deciding on a particular methodology. The flexibleness and customization prospects would possibly make platforms just like the MonTitan enchantment to flash array distributors.