Satara Shoppers: This Storage Processor could deliver a massive boost to your SSD performance

Saturday, August 1, 2020

This Storage Processor could deliver a massive boost to your SSD performance

Storage startup Pliops has announced sampling of its Storage Processors to select tier-one cloud and enterprise companies and was on track to start commercial production of the processors later in 2020.

The Storage Processors ASICs are said to increase performance of NAND flash storage solutions, such as SSDs, by over 10 times and also decrease latency by up to 1000 times in various database applications.

“As the success of GPUs and AI processors has shown, there is a pressing need for specialized solutions that accelerate the pace of workflows,” noted Steve Fingerhut, president and chief business officer for Pliops. “Because data growth is absolutely booming at a time when storage and data processing is slowing, now is the time to take this approach and apply it to mainstream workloads like unstructured and structured databases, analytics and virtually any application that uses flash storage.”

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Storage Processor

The concept of Pliops’ Storage Processor (PSP) relies on software and hardware. The software layer consists of an NVMe driver as well as a Pliops Kernel Module that replace traditional storage engines thus removing ‘layers of the database, file, block, and storage management accumulated over decades by legacy architectures’ and eliminating bottlenecks.

Meanwhile, the ASICs designed to accelerate processing of data-intensive workloads (such as databases) offloads processing of compute-intensive functions from CPUs while using a fraction of power that a general-purpose processors need to perform the same tasks, the company said.

Applications accelerated by Pliops include MySQL, MariaDB, mongoDB, Redis, Oracle, Apache Spark, and Cassandra. The company emphasizes that deployment of its Storage Processor is relatively easy and does not require changes to ‘most’ programs that are in use today.

According to Pliops, increasing performance using its Storage Processors can reduce expenditures on CPUs and SSDs and even make lower-cost 3D QLC NAND-based drives viable for mainstream workloads. Furthermore, PSPs can also reduce power consumption of servers and datacenters. Reduction of hardware and power costs naturally lower overall costs and greatly increase value of solid-state storage.

Pliops has raised money from various companies and venture capital firms, including Intel Capital, Mellanox, Western Digital, Xilinx, SoftBank, Somv, and Viola Ventures.