Phillips has developed a storage processor that accelerates memory 100 times faster
August 11, 2020
A new star is injured in the Israeli storage field: Pliops from Ramat Gan is preparing for the start of mass production of a new type of storage processor, designed to eliminate the bottleneck of SSDs in large data centers
Pliops from Ramat Gan is preparing for the mass production of the special processing cards it is developing, which are intended to change the structure of the storage system of large databases. "As demonstrated by the success of GPUs and AIs, dedicated processors are needed to accelerate processing," said Steve Fingerhrat, the company's business development director. "We are in an age where the amount of data is on a steep rise, but the speed of information processing and the pace of processing are stagnant."
The company has developed a hardware solution that addresses this issue, allowing large data centers to accelerate memory access 100 times faster, without having to replace the existing SSD drive infrastructure, and continue to purchase standard SSDs from their regular vendors. The solution is a hardware card called Pliops Storage Processor that appears in the format of a PCIe card and acts as a storage accelerator. It eliminates the need for software layers that mediate between drives and the database, and stores the information in a format developed by the company.
In terms of the database itself, nothing has changed. The company offers the product in three ways: a card gets stuck on the server, a card gets stuck in the storage array, or using a card in a cloud service in the form of cards as a service for key-value-based cloud applications. The company said it has begun providing samples to select customers, and plans to begin serial production before the end of 2020. The main problem the company faces is related to the industry's' original sin: the transition from slow magnetic drives to flash memory-based drives (SSDs) has created new memory access problems , Which burden the operation of the data centers.
For technical reasons, the magnetic drives were divided into sectors, but as the industry switched to using SSDs it continued to maintain the sector format to ensure backward compatibility and allow for gradual processing between the two technologies. This means that the memory is divided into equal segments that are not identical to the size of the information units it stores. In most applications the problem is not significant, as the cost of the memory unit is very large, but in large data centers where the memory arrays have to meet the requirements of more than half a million read and write operations per second (500K IOPS), the mismatch between physical memory size (block) and memory size Required, produces a difficult problem.
Founders of Phillips (from right to left): Uri Beatler, Moshe Twito and Aryeh Margim
This is especially noticeable when working with database software where most of the information is organized in a key-value format. The key is used as an index and the value represents the information itself. However, there is no uniform size of keys and values - they can be very large or very small - and in most cases they do not match the size of the blocks in the SSD memory. The result is that the process of storing and retrieving information requires wasting resources or using data compression systems and deploying them, sometimes using the CPU resources of the CPU itself (or dedicated FPGA cards that cloud companies plan to build themselves) - and greatly slowing down storage system responsiveness.
Pliops was founded in 2017 by storage experts from M-Systems, XtremIO and Samsung. CEO Uri Beitler managed Samsung's SSD controller development center in Israel, the company's chief technologist, Moshe Twito, served as chief technologist at Samsung's development center and chairman Arie Margie was one of the founders of M-Systems, XtremIO and ActivePath. Its technology is protected by eight patents that are in the process of being registered. Since its inception, it has raised about $ 40 million from entities such as Xilinx, Mellanox, Intel Capital, Western Digital and Softbank.
https://techtime.co.il/2020/08/11/pliops-2/
August 11, 2020
A new star is injured in the Israeli storage field: Pliops from Ramat Gan is preparing for the start of mass production of a new type of storage processor, designed to eliminate the bottleneck of SSDs in large data centers
Pliops from Ramat Gan is preparing for the mass production of the special processing cards it is developing, which are intended to change the structure of the storage system of large databases. "As demonstrated by the success of GPUs and AIs, dedicated processors are needed to accelerate processing," said Steve Fingerhrat, the company's business development director. "We are in an age where the amount of data is on a steep rise, but the speed of information processing and the pace of processing are stagnant."
The company has developed a hardware solution that addresses this issue, allowing large data centers to accelerate memory access 100 times faster, without having to replace the existing SSD drive infrastructure, and continue to purchase standard SSDs from their regular vendors. The solution is a hardware card called Pliops Storage Processor that appears in the format of a PCIe card and acts as a storage accelerator. It eliminates the need for software layers that mediate between drives and the database, and stores the information in a format developed by the company.
In terms of the database itself, nothing has changed. The company offers the product in three ways: a card gets stuck on the server, a card gets stuck in the storage array, or using a card in a cloud service in the form of cards as a service for key-value-based cloud applications. The company said it has begun providing samples to select customers, and plans to begin serial production before the end of 2020. The main problem the company faces is related to the industry's' original sin: the transition from slow magnetic drives to flash memory-based drives (SSDs) has created new memory access problems , Which burden the operation of the data centers.
For technical reasons, the magnetic drives were divided into sectors, but as the industry switched to using SSDs it continued to maintain the sector format to ensure backward compatibility and allow for gradual processing between the two technologies. This means that the memory is divided into equal segments that are not identical to the size of the information units it stores. In most applications the problem is not significant, as the cost of the memory unit is very large, but in large data centers where the memory arrays have to meet the requirements of more than half a million read and write operations per second (500K IOPS), the mismatch between physical memory size (block) and memory size Required, produces a difficult problem.
Founders of Phillips (from right to left): Uri Beatler, Moshe Twito and Aryeh Margim
This is especially noticeable when working with database software where most of the information is organized in a key-value format. The key is used as an index and the value represents the information itself. However, there is no uniform size of keys and values - they can be very large or very small - and in most cases they do not match the size of the blocks in the SSD memory. The result is that the process of storing and retrieving information requires wasting resources or using data compression systems and deploying them, sometimes using the CPU resources of the CPU itself (or dedicated FPGA cards that cloud companies plan to build themselves) - and greatly slowing down storage system responsiveness.
Pliops was founded in 2017 by storage experts from M-Systems, XtremIO and Samsung. CEO Uri Beitler managed Samsung's SSD controller development center in Israel, the company's chief technologist, Moshe Twito, served as chief technologist at Samsung's development center and chairman Arie Margie was one of the founders of M-Systems, XtremIO and ActivePath. Its technology is protected by eight patents that are in the process of being registered. Since its inception, it has raised about $ 40 million from entities such as Xilinx, Mellanox, Intel Capital, Western Digital and Softbank.
https://techtime.co.il/2020/08/11/pliops-2/
