We introduced our ‘RAID Offload technology’ at the Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) 2024 symposium in August, and it earned a ‘Best of Show’ award in the ‘Most Innovative Technology’ category. With this honor, we’ve been very busy with requests to learn more about this innovative technology. A good place to begin is to read our recently published technical brief entitled, “RAID Offload Technology: A New Paradigm Re-inventing RAID and Erasure Code Data Protection Using NVMe™ SSDs.” For this blog, I’ll present some key benefits.
Data redundancy solutions (such as RAID and erasure code) are compute-intensive and consume high DRAM bandwidth in the write path. Some RAID solutions hurt CPU performance due to cache thrashing. However, the bigger challenge is that when NVMe SSDs are deployed within a system, read/write performance1 typically doubles with every PCIe® generation, which in turn, shifts the performance bottlenecks to these hardware and software data redundancy solutions. Both RAID and erasure code solutions struggle to keep pace with the rapid SSD performance advancements. We addressed this industry challenge with our RAID Offload technology proposal which features an architecture that offloads compute and DRAM bandwidth demands to SSDs.
There are three foundational pillars that enable KIOIXA RAID Offload technology:
- Integrated power-efficient parity compute engines
- An onboard memory buffer, either a Controller Memory Buffer (CMB) or Subsystem Local Memory (SLM)
- Integrated Direct Memory Address (DMA) engines to facilitate data movement to and from the onboard memory buffer
A DMA engine is used with the SSD controller CMB (or SLM) to avoid data movement up to the CPU and back. Any required parity computation is handled by the SSD controller accelerator block. The beauty of this implementation is that the DMA engine is able to access the entire host address space, and can receive and transfer data from other SSDs that reside on the PCIe bus.
As we noted in our technical brief, our limited performance PoC (Proof of Concept) demonstrated a 91% reduction2 in system DRAM bandwidth utilization using RAID Offload when compared against a conventional software RAID implementation performed on the CPU.
Key Benefits of RAID Offload
When building a data redundancy solution optimized for latency and throughput, RAID Offload is extremely flexible for existing hardware and software RAID applications and delivers the following benefits:
- Usage optimization of compute resources
- Frees up host CPU, cache and memory resources to focus on primary applications
- Improvement in system-level performance
- Initializes/rebuilds a RAID volume at the maximum sequential write performance of an SSD
- Efficient scaling
- RAID parity compute throughput scales proportionally as the number of SSDs increases
- Helps address the memory wall issue
- Easier integration with the existing infrastructure
- Utilizes the existing mature RAID stack and user interface
- Agnostic to RAID geometry
- TCO optimization
- Increases power efficiency in server and storage systems
We’re working with the NVMe community to standardize RAID Offload and have it become broadly available. Very exciting times for RAID Offload technology!
FOOTNOTES:
1 Read and write speed may vary depending on the host device, read and write conditions, and file size.
2 As of July 31, 2024, based on testing by Kioxia Corporation and published in the technical brief, “RAID Offload Technology: A New Paradigm Re-inventing RAID and Erasure Code Data Protection Using NVMe™ SSDs.”
TRADEMARKS:
NVMe is a registered or unregistered trademark of NVM Express, Inc. in the United States and other countries. PCIe is a registered trademark of PCI-SIG. All other company names, product names and service names may be trademarks of third-party companies.
DISCLAIMERS:
KIOXIA America, Inc. may make changes to specifications and product descriptions at any time. The information presented in this blog is for informational purposes only and may contain technical inaccuracies, omissions and typographical errors. Any performance tests and ratings are measured using systems that reflect the approximate performance of KIOXIA America, Inc. products as measured by those tests. In no event will KIOXIA America, Inc. be liable to any person for any direct, indirect, special or other consequential damages arising from the use of any information contained herein, even if KIOXIA America, Inc. are advised of the possibility of such damages.