Home Enterprise Podcast #110: The Rising Importance of Storage Accelerator Cards

Podcast #110: The Rising Importance of Storage Accelerator Cards

by Harold Fritts

For this podcast, Brian connected with Pliops Global VP of Products and Marketing, Tony Afshary. Brian has known Tony for a long time, so this is an effortless conversation with great insight into Pliops, accelerator card technologies, what is driving the market, and what the future might hold.

For this podcast, Brian connected with Pliops Global VP of Products and Marketing, Tony Afshary. Brian has known Tony for a long time, so this is an effortless conversation with great insight into Pliops, accelerator card technologies, what is driving the market, and what the future might hold.

Tony has been in the storage and accelerator technology sector for many years, working for companies like Intel, LSI, and Seagate before joining Pliops.

StorageReview did a detailed, in-depth review on the Pliops XDP recently and found it easy to install and use. The performance numbers were solid. Even giving Software RAID all the benefits available, the Pliops XDP far exceeded expectations based on real-world results.

There is a lot of information in this podcast, focusing on a hot product set. Certainly worth a listen.

00.00 Introduction

  • What the next generation of accelerator cards can do for computing and challenges
  • What problems are Pliops and their competitors trying to solve
  • The gap between what the CPU and Software can do
  • Bottlenecks when accessing NVMe drives
  • The need to offload tasks from CPU to accelerators

05.00 Evolution from RAID cards to Accelerators

  • RAID card design
  • Storage drive technology created the need for new architecture
  • Discussion around Pliops hardware – visual
  • How the Pliops hardware works
  • Design
  • Key Value APIs

11.00 Data Flow

  • How blocks flow through the card
  • What happens before data is written to SSD
  • Why Pliops is so effective and efficient

15.00 Dense NAND technology

  • Pliops design
    • works with any vendor
    • the bigger the drive, the better
    • the cheaper the drive, the better
    • customer hesitation in going to larger drives
    • Things to avoid with NAND

20:00 SR Tests with Pliops and Solidigm drives

  • Simple to install
  • Comparison between RAID5 and RAID0
  • Results
  • Why the need for a new ASIC?
  • Cost, density, and geometry are positive with ASIC
  • Flexibility
  • What’s with the Lane?

25.00 More about Lanes

  • Lanes make a difference in performance
  • Managing fan-outs on a system
  • Form factor impact
  • CXL 2 v 3

30.00 AMD v Intel

  • Both are okay with Pliops
  • Interest in ARM technology
  • No data on when applications will run on ARM

35.00 VMware support

  • Orchestration and containers are the requirements
  • Virtualized environments need support
  • How do prospects check out Pliops
    • access to Pliops lab
    • most are deploying drives in their environment
    • partnering with phoenixnap

40.00 Wrap up

Podcast video on YouTube

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