#194 - ScaleFlux & Computational Storage Devices

In this week’s episode, Martin and Chris discuss Computational Storage with Tong Zhang, Chief Scientist and co-founder at ScaleFlux. Computational Storage devices add value to traditional NAND by offloading data processes directly onto the storage media. ScaleFlux offers two families of CSDs, including the CSD 2000 series, which implements inline data compression to improve endurance and logical device capacity.

In this conversation, Tong covers the benefits of using CSDs as well as some of the challenges of implementation. It’s likely we will se CSDs being used for AI/Analytics pre-processing, especially in the public cloud.

More information on ScaleFlux can be found at https://www.scaleflux.com/ with further technical details of Computational Storage on the SNIA Website.

Elapsed Time: 00:43:39

Timeline

00:00:00 – Intros
00:04:00 – What is the ScaleFlux view of Computational Storage?
00:06:45 – What will the drivers of Computational Storage be?
00:08:40 – Compression can increase endurance and capacity
00:11:00 – The CSD2000 does inline compression/decompression in FPGA
00:13:05 – Why aren’t all vendors doing inline compression?
00:14:45 – Databases make a good use case for CSD
00:17:10 – Compression can be 2:1 or as high as 5:1, depending on data
00:20:15 – SSDs do get hot!
00:21:30 – FPGAs will be replaced by ASICs in the future products
00:23:00 – AI/Analytics is a big target for Computational Storage
00:25:00 – Advanced functionality may require APIs
00:27:00 – NVMe will be used as a protocol to push code to CS drives
00:30:20 – Compute and storage are going to have to work closer together
00:35:00 – Computational Storage adoption will be evolutionary
00:38:00 – How will RAID/erasure coding be affected with CS?
00:40:20 – ScaleFlux will support PCIe-4/5 and possibly PLC NAND
00:43:00 – Wrap Up

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