FMS 2020: Pliops Highlights Storage Processor

SSDs have become mainstream for high-performance applications – but are data center managers getting the most out of their SSD investments?

At FMS Virtual Conference and Expo, Pliops will highlight its Storage Processor, a hardware-enabled storage engine in a PCIe card form factor that unlocks the potential of SSD storage.

“The performance potential of most of the flash sitting in data centers is barely being tapped into – 80% of the flash being purchased today is being wasted,” noted Steve Fingerhut, president and chief business officer. “We’re here to change that. Instead of resorting to data center sprawl, overprovisioning and increased costs, customers deploying Pliops maximize the available performance and expand the potential of existing architectures. We are looking forward to the opportunities and forums FMS provides to share how we’re giving architects and engineers the power to do more with their SSDs.”

A building block for the data-centric era, the Storage Processor addresses the growth of storage – and the subsequent computational processing requirements this has created. The company uses a patented data structure to eliminate amplification and enable consistently high I/O performance, capacity and endurance.

FMS Virtual Booth Demos
Featured in its virtual booth, the firm will be showcasing a number of demos that demonstrate the following values:

• Application acceleration – Reduced latency and CPU offload enables higher performance and greater application instance scaling.
• Dynamic capacity expansion – With high space efficiency, store more user data than physical drive capacity via thin provisioning – a first in a building block accelerator.
• Drive fail protection – Architecture natively simplifies and accelerates drive fail protection (like RAID-5) at twice the performance of RAID-0, even during rebuild from drive failure.
• Endurance – With high write efficiencies, lower-cost SSDs – including QLC – can be used for an extended life across high-performance workloads, even enabling SSDs to last up to 5 years instead of 3.

“We are excited to see how innovators like Pliops are using Intel QLC 3D NAND SSDs to maximize overall solution value and performance,” noted David Dixon, VP, data center NAND division, Intel Corp. “Pliops has shown that advanced data shaping and acceleration techniques can deliver the full value of QLC savings with no compromises. In fact, using Pliops technology with Intel QLC 3D NAND SSDs provides better performance than TLC SSDs alone. We look forward to continued collaboration with Pliops.”

Takeshi Hasegawa, engineering manager of SAKURA Internet, Inc., explained: “As a cloud computing provider, we see first-hand the high cost of using flash. Thanks to Pliops’ technology, we are able to realize higher performance from our investments and support more concurrent users. Many of our customers use dedicated servers with NVMe flash, but they want to increase their database performance. Using Pliops Storage Processor provides a superior architecture, with high performance and space savings all with drive failure protection. This is the best product for server-side flash that I have seen in 10 years.”

“In recent years, there has been an explosion of data,” said Peter Zaitsev, co-founder and CEO, Percona LLC. “Because of this, there have been a lot of concerns about being able to handle this data with performance and efficiency. Pliops’ innovations are absolutely fantastic. Over the last decade, we have seen huge performance gains due to the transition from HDDs to flash and other types of solid state storage. But that has since leveled off, in large part because we’re treating storage as ‘dumb’ devices, which is not helpful for database workloads. Pliops’ technology enables the ability to turn ‘dumb’ flash storage into ‘smart’ flash storage. According to our benchmarks, the Pliops Storage Processor is unique in that it is able to increase performance, improve compression and reduce write amplification.”

Pliops is headlining a keynote presentation and participating in several technical sessions at FMS:

• FMS Keynote Presentation – Storage Processors to Unleash the potential of flash Storage with special presenters Aryeh Mergi, FMS Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Intel, Percona and SAKURA Internet who discuss their experiences with PlIOPS’ Storage Processor
• FMS Session – Storage Processors Accelerate Data Workloads
• FMS Panel – Which SSD Is Best for Your Application?
• FMS Live Chat with Nvidia – DPUs and Storage Processors to Accelerate and Secure Modern Data Centers

Pliops’ mission to deliver the performance needed for today’s most pressing data-intensive challenges – from databases and analytics to SDS and ML platforms – has been met with industry support. Most recently, the company announced that its Storage Processor has been tested and evaluated by more than 10 tier-1 cloud and enterprise companies. The results? The company has been proven to boost performance by more than 10x and reduce four 9s latency by up to 1,000x, allowing enterprises to up-level existing infrastructures, eliminate bottlenecks and improve resource utilization.

Storage Processors are now sampling to select customers, with availability for early 2021.