Contributed by Starblaze
Starblaze has successfully taped out its high-performance SSD Controller SoC based on Arm Architecture. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation and automation for efficient remote work, pushing organizations to ramp up their digital infrastructure. This has resulted in an increased demand for data-centric infrastructure innovation, including compute, storage, and networking. Arm’s unique business model of licensing semiconductor technology building blocks has enabled its silicon partners to innovate in various digital infrastructure applications. One such application is enterprise and cloud solid-state drives (SSDs), and Starblaze Technology is one of the partners that has built a futuristic product based on Arm.
3 Key trends in cloud and enterprise storage and disk drives
1. Larger capacities and more specialized storage tiers
Hyperscale and cloud infrastructure require a variety of storage tiers, resulting in different storage options in the cloud. Short video formats such as Tiktok and Youtube are driving increased demand for SSDs due to their predictable performance, lower latency, and high throughput. Enterprise SSDs are expected to see strong growth, with HDDs also continuing to be an important storage medium due to continued innovation on capacity and features focused on the cloud use case.
At the disk level, SSDs with large capacities of 16TB and 32TB are becoming available. To ensure best performance for these large-capacity SSDs, the Flash Translation Layer (FTL) tables in SSD controllers need 16GB to 32GB DRAMs, requiring processors within the SSD controller to support larger addressable memory. Arm’s Cortex-R82 and Cortex-A series are built to enable wider addressing to support these requirements.
2. Higher performance interfaces
SSD controllers are aiming to saturate the host interface bus for maximum bandwidth. The majority of new enterprise SSD controllers support PCIe Gen4 at 16GT/s per lane, with future advancements driving rapid transition to PCIe Gen5 and Gen6 to meet increasing demand for higher performance and throughput. This requires faster SSD controller processors to handle transaction requests from the host and run more sophisticated wear-leveling algorithms.
3. More compute near storage
Compute capabilities need to move closer to storage as the volume and importance of data grows. Computational storage is gaining traction to improve network efficiency, and the addition of compute into storage can make storage processing itself smarter. This can have a huge impact on key storage metrics such as random write IOPS, latency, quality of service, and endurance.
Starblaze STAR2000: A next-gen SSD controller built on Arm
Starblaze Technology’s new generation of high-performance enterprise-class PCIe4.0 SSD controller chip STAR2000, designed with Arm Cortex-A55 multi-core processor and Arm China’s STAR-MC1 processor, has successfully taped out. The product will be launched to the market in the second half of 2022. The STAR2000 is the first high-performance enterprise-level SSD controller in the China market that uses Arm’s Cortex-A55 CPU.
STAR2000 is built for the data center and enterprise market, adopting 12nm process and fully supporting the NVMe2.0 protocol to meet the stringent requirements of enterprise-class SSDs. It also incorporates a Neural Network Processor (NPU) accelerator with 8 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS) compute capability to run AI/ML workloads more efficiently, improve reliability, optimize power consumption, and realize intelligent self-checking and early defect detection.
Starblaze Technology plans to continue collaborating with Arm and Arm China to meet higher performance and richer product portfolio needs for consumer and enterprise storage, data center, edge computing, and other markets. For more information on Arm’s storage solutions, please visit our webpage.
View Arm Storage Solutions