Feed: AnandTech
Feed Link: https://www.anandtech.com
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Title: Silicon Motion Demonstrates Flexible Data Placement on MonTitan Gen 5
Enterprise SSD Platform

Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2024 10:00:00 EDT
Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21522/silicon-...

At FMS 2024, the technological requirements from the storage and memory
subsystem took center stage. Both SSD and controller vendors had various
demonstrations touting their suitability for different stages of the AI data
pipeline - ingestion, preparation, training, checkpointing, and inference.
Vendors like Solidigm have different types of SSDs optimized for different
stages of the pipeline. At the same time, controller vendors have taken
advantage of one of the features introduced recently in the NVM Express
standard - Flexible Data Placement (FDP).

FDP involves the host providing information / hints about the areas where the
controller could place the incoming write data in order to reduce the write
amplification. These hints are generated based on specific block sizes
advertised by the device. The feature is completely backwards-compatible,
with non-FDP hosts working just as before with FDP-enabled SSDs, and vice-
versa.

Silicon Motion's MonTitan Gen 5 Enterprise SSD Platform was announced back in
2022. Since then, Silicon Motion has been touting the flexibility of the
platform, allowing its customers to incorporate their own features as part of
the customization process. This approach is common in the enterprise space,
as we have seen with Marvell's Bravera SC5 SSD controller in the DapuStor
SSDs and Microchip's Flashtec controllers in the Longsys FORESEE enterprise
SSDs.

At FMS 2024, the company was demonstrating the advantages of flexible data
placement by allowing a single QLC SSD based on their MonTitan platform to
take part in different stages of the AI data pipeline while maintaining the
required quality of service (minimum bandwidth) for each process. The company
even has a trademarked name (PerformaShape) for the firmware feature in the
controller that allows the isolation of different concurrent SSD accesses
(from different stages in the AI data pipeline) to guarantee this QoS.
Silicon Motion claims that this scheme will enable its customers to get the
maximum write performance possible from QLC SSDs without negatively impacting
the performance of other types of accesses.

Silicon Motion and Phison have market leadership in the client SSD controller
market with similar approaches. However, their enterprise SSD controller
marketing couldn't be more different. While Phison has gone in for a turnkey
solution with their Gen 5 SSD platform (to the extent of not adopting the
white label route for this generation, and instead opting to get the SSDs
qualified with different cloud service providers themselves), Silicon Motion
is opting for a different approach. The flexibility and customization
possibilities can make platforms like the MonTitan appeal to flash array
vendors.

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