Growth in the enterprise SSD (eSSD) market has outpaced growth in the consumer SSD market over the past few years. A major driver on this front has been the demands of AI servers for both training and inference. In addition to the usual vendors like Samsung, Solidigm, Micron, Kioxia, and Western Digital serving cloud service providers (CSPs) and the likes of Facebook, a number of companies have been operating in China to serve the growing eSSD market.
In our review of the Microchip Flashtec 5016, we noted that Longsys was using Microchip SSD controllers to prepare and market enterprise SSDs under the FORESEE brand. Long before that, two companies—DapuStor and Memblaze—had begun releasing eSSDs, specifically targeting the Chinese market.
There are two factors driving the current growth in the eSSD market. On the performance side, the use of eTLC behind the Gen 5 controller allows vendors to tout significant benefits over previous-generation Gen 4 drives. At the same time, there is a capacity game going on, where there is a race to cram as much NAND into a single U.2/EDSFF package. QLC is being used for this purpose, and we saw a number of these 128TB eSSDs at FMS 2024.
DapuStor and Memblaze both rely on Marvell SSD controllers for their flagship drives. Their latest Gen 5 product releases use the Marvell Bravera SC5 controller. Like Flashtec controllers, they are not intended to be turnkey solutions. Instead, the SSD vendor has significant flexibility in implementing specific features for the desired target market.
At FMS 2024, both DapuStor and Memblaze showcased their latest solutions for the Gen 5 market. Memblaze celebrated shipments of over 150,000 units of its flagship Gen 5 solution, the PBlaze7 7940, which is built with Micron’s 232L 3D eTLC with Marvell’s Bravera SC5 controller. Available in capacities up to 30.72TB, this SSD offers 14GBps read/10GBps write along with 2.8M/720K random read/write performance, all while consuming less than 16W typical power. Additionally, support for several NVMe features, such as Software-Enabled Flash (SEF) and Zoned Namespace (ZNS), helped Memblaze and Marvell receive the “Best of Show” award for “Most Innovative Customer Implementation.”
DapuStor has shown off its current offerings (including the Haishen H5000 series with the same Bravera SC5 controller). The company is including YMTC NAND in its Chinese-market drives. However, other regions use BiCS flash. The company also showed off an unannounced 61.44TB QLC prototype SSD. Despite the Haishen5 series label (all current members use eTLC NAND), this one is equipped with QLC flash.
DapuStor has already invested resources in implementing NVMe’s Flexible Data Placement (FDP) feature in the firmware of this QLC SSD. The company also had an interesting demo session on using CXL memory expansion to store FTL for high-capacity enterprise SSDs – although this is something for the future and is not related to any current product on the market.
Having established themselves in the Chinese market, both DapuStor and Memblaze are looking to expand into other markets. Having products with leading performance numbers and features in the eSSD growth segment will position them well in this endeavor.
