At FMS 2024, the technology requirements of the storage and memory subsystem took center stage. Both SSD and controller vendors ran various demos touting their suitability for different stages of the AI data pipeline—ingest, prepare, train, checkpoint, and infer. Vendors like Solidigm have different types of SSDs optimized for different stages of the pipeline. At the same time, controller vendors took advantage of one of the features recently introduced in the NVM Express standard—Flexible Data Placement (FDP).
FDP is where the host provides information/hints on where the controller could place incoming write data to reduce write amplification. These hints are generated based on specific block sizes advertised by the device. The feature is completely backward compatible, and non-FDP-aware hosts work just like before with FDP-aware SSDs and vice versa.
Silicon Motion’s MonTitan Gen 5 Enterprise SSD platform was announced in 2022. Since then, Silicon Motion has touted the platform’s flexibility, allowing its customers to incorporate their own features as part of the customization process. This approach is common in the enterprise space, as we’ve seen with Marvell’s Bravera SC5 SSD controller in DapuStor SSDs and Microchip’s Flashtec controllers in Longsys FORESEE Enterprise SSDs.
At FMS 2024, the company demonstrated the benefits of flexible data placement by allowing a single MonTitan-based QLC SSD to participate in different stages of an AI data pipeline while maintaining the required quality of service (minimum throughput) for each process. The company even has a proprietary name (PerformaShape) for a firmware feature in the controller that allows it to isolate different concurrent SSD accesses (from different stages of the AI data pipeline) to guarantee that quality of service. Silicon Motion says this scheme will allow its customers to get the maximum possible write performance from QLC SSDs without negatively impacting the performance of other types of accesses.
Silicon Motion and Phison both have market leaders in consumer SSD controllers, with similar approaches. However, their marketing of enterprise SSD controllers could not be more different. While Phison has opted for a turnkey solution with its Gen 5 SSD platform (to the point of not white-labeling the generation, opting instead to qualify SSDs with various cloud providers), Silicon Motion is taking a different approach. The flexibility and customization could make platforms like MonTitan attractive to flash array vendors.
