Podcast #110: The Rising Importance of Storage Accelerator Cards

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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2 years ago

Harold Fritts

I have been in the tech industry since IBM created Selectric. My background, though, is writing. So I decided to get out of the pre-sales biz and return to my roots, doing a bit of writing but still being involved in technology.