Micron Introduced SolidScale Architecture Powered by NVMe Storage

Micron Technology, Inc. introduced the SolidScale architecture, an integrated platform that delivers low-latency and high performance access to compute and storage.

The SolidScale architecture provides customers with the agility to deploy next-generation, cloud-native applications while supporting legacy applications that run the enterprises of today – and tomorrow.

From online transaction processing, to virtual platforms and analytics, to machine learning, the firm’s architecture delivers data quickly due to its high throughput, and delivers faster time to results because of its low latency.

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“We estimate that companies using NVMe SSDs deployed in application servers today are on average using less than 50% of their IO/s and capacity. With the new Micron SolidScale architecture, capacity is shared across application servers, unlocking capacity customers have already paid for so that they can do more with less and unleash flash’s true performance,” said Darren Thomas, VP, storage business unit, Micron. “At Micron, we consider the impact of every workload, application and environment as we design the technology, products and systems that allow our customers to deploy applications faster and scale without limits.“

It’s estimated that the total amount of digital data created worldwide will reach 163ZB per year by 2025. As enterprises move toward a scale-out data center, they need a way to unleash more potential out of their data in a flexible architecture that can integrate with their growing storage and compute needs. Replacing old storage without also modernizing the interfaces, protocols and networks only shifts the bottleneck elsewhere within the system. The company has coupled flash storage with PCIe NVMe in a platform using converged a NVMe over fabric infrastructure that performs like server-based storage with the ability to scale at near linear performance rates.

Micron NVMe tray

SolidScale platform architecture
Designed to unleash the potential of NVMe SSDs and to mainstream NVMe SSDs, the SolidScale platform allows companies to build a scale-out storage infrastructure that provides all the benefits of a centralized single pool of storage with the performance of local in-server SSDs. It connects multiple nodes using high-speed RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) fabric with low-latency software that provides a crafted set of data services – delivering a converged infrastructure that performs like local DAS.

Initially launching for Linux environments, with future generations extending to other software-defined storage (SDS) applications, SolidScale is a dual-purpose design that provides customers with a scalable, high performance block storage SDS architecture. Designed for the demanding application workloads including big data and analytics, database acceleration and HPC, among others, it can also be used as a foundational NVMe over fabric infrastructure for next-generation data centers, forming the backbone for multi-faceted file systems.

Delivering performance, latency and workload optimized capacity, the SolidScale architecture stands up in a 2U node configuration in a 24U server rack enclosure.

Key features of the architecture include:

• Flexible infrastructure: The logical volume feature of the SolidScale platform provides flexibility to create and manage a single, centralized pool of storage that allows customers to create right size volumes for each server’s data repository.

• Optimized performance: The speed of the company’s NVMe SSDs coupled with high-bandwidth Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. ‘s fabric delivers performance that scales by adding an average of 5μs of additional latency to an application’s data path when compared to a local in-server NVMe. SolidScale architecture is expected to reduce end-to-end latency under 200μs. Preliminary tests of the SolidScale platform measured over 10.9 million IO/s with three 2U SolidScale nodes.

• Simple manageability: The Web-based management interface of the platform provides a simple, graphical setup and configuration for key data services.

• Scalability: The architecture enables customers to scale storage capacity with, or independently from, compute; in addition, performance scales efficiently as more nodes are added.

• Breakthrough data center efficiency: The SolidScale architecture pools the available storage together, providing a platform that can either do the same work with fewer servers or more work in the same number of servers. Overall, this allows compute servers to be thinner, allowing storage to scale independently of compute.

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“NVMeF is a much faster way of connecting to the CPU by using the high-speed interconnects of the RoCE fabric, making this architecture ideal for a range of low-latency, robust data needs spanning real time data analytics, HPC and hyperscale database use cases,” said Laura DuBois, group VP, enterprise storage, server and system infrastructure software research, IDC. “Micron is taking an early mover position by pushing the envelope of software and hardware to enable low latency, reduced costs and high performance to tackle data intensive workloads.“

“The performance benefits of NVMe flash are impressive but traditional storage architectures are not optimized to leverage such performance over a network. Micron has taken the innovation lead by designing a fully integrated Shared Accelerated Storage architecture, that combines Micron NVMe and Excelero software-defined storage innovations,” said Lior Gal, CEO and co-founder, Excelero, Inc. “Micron’s SolidScale architecture allows customers to deploy NVMe storage at data center scale, without compromising on performance or efficiency.“

“Faster storage needs faster networks – in terms of bandwidth, latency, and advanced protocols like NVMe over Fabrics” said Kevin Deierling, VP, marketing, Mellanox. “We are proud to connect Micron’s innovative SolidScale solution with our end-to-end 100G Ethernet RoCE networking solutions. The combination of Spectrum switches, ConnectX-4 adapters and LinkX cables enables SolidScale to maximize performance and total infrastructure efficiency.“

The SolidScale architecture is available to key company’s customers and partners to test their own application workloads within existing data center environments. Based on customer validation and testing of the architecture, volume production of the SolidScale platform is expected to begin in early 2018.

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