- Microchip Technology’s newest SSD controller comes with efficient power, performance and reliability while delivering enhanced security features
- Also supports dual-port modes of operation, providing high availability solutions for external storage system applications
There is a need for scaling of cloud infrastructure for providing more bandwidth to the storage, given that data centres are supporting more Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) workloads. This requires the adoption of PCIe Gen 4-capable NVM Express™ (NVMe™) Solid State Drives (SSDs) in smaller form factors such as M.2 and newer SNIA Enterprise and Data Center SSD Form Factor (EDSFF) E1.S form factors. These SSDs require controllers with optimised footprints and power while driving the NAND flash to its maximum potential and maintaining a rich feature set and reliability of NVMe SSD.
Microchip Technology has now announced its newest member of the Flashtec® family, the Flashtec NVMe 3108 PCIe Gen 4 enterprise NVMe SSD controller. The 8-channel Flashtec NVMe 3108 complements the 16-channel Flashtec NVMe 3016 and provides a full suite of PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD solutions to support a comprehensive set of data centre storage requirements.
Secure features
The new Flashtec NVMe 3108 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD controller enables a variety of compact SSD form factors with efficient power, performance and reliability while delivering enhanced security features. The Flashtec NVMe 3108 has greater than one million IOs per second (IOPS) for random workloads and greater than 6 Gigabytes per second (GB/s) of sequential bandwidth. The solution provides end-to-end enterprise data integrity with high reliability and critical security features including secure boot with Hardware Root of Trust to ensure that data centre operators provide a high level of data security. The eight programmable flash channel controllers coupled with strong error correction engines provide support for next-generation of high layer count Triple Level Cell (TLC) and Quad Level Cell (QLC) NAND technologies.
“The PCIe Gen 4 storage ecosystem is poised for rapid adoption by data centre operators worldwide and we’re very excited to announce the availability of our new Flashtec NVMe 3108 to enable new products in this space,” said Andrew Dieckmann, associate vice president of Microchip’s Data Center Solutions business unit. “The Flashtec NVMe 3108 delivers enterprise performance and enterprise reliability in a compact package with low power, enabling Flashtec based SSD solutions to be optimized for lower capacity points and smaller form-factors with compelling power and performance attributes.”
The Flashtec NVMe 3108’s flexibility is its programmable multi-core Arm subsystem. In combination with several hardware acceleration engines, it enables users to optimise their SSD solutions for a wide variety of applications such as single root IO virtualisation (SR-IOV)-capable SSDs, Zoned Namespace SSDs, Key-Value SSDs and Open Channel SSDs while maintaining targeted performance.
External storage
Furthermore, the Flashtec NVMe 3108 supports dual-port modes of operation providing high availability solutions for external storage system applications.
“As Memblaze looks forward to PCIe Gen 4 infrastructure we continue our focus on performance, energy efficiency and reliability as we evolve the PBlaze family to new higher layer count NAND across our product portfolio,” said Taile Zhang, senior vice president of Product and R&D, Memblaze Technologies. “Microchip’s innovative Flashtec NVMe 3108 NVMe SSD controller enables a performant, reliable, secure and flexible solution for cost and power-sensitive mainstream applications with rapid time-to-market due to firmware portability with the high-performance NVMe 3016 NVMe SSD controller.”
The Flashtec NVMe 3108 is part of Microchip’s full end-to-end suite of storage infrastructure and endpoint solutions for PCIe Gen 4, which includes the Flashtec NVMe 3016 16-channel NVMe SSD controller, the Switchtec™ family of PCIe Gen 4 Switches and Fabric Solutions and the SmartRAID and SmartHBA PCIe Gen 4 tri-mode storage solutions.
Development Tools
Microchip’s Flashtec NVMe 3108 offers several options for software and hardware support. A complete software development kit includes Microchip’s reference firmware with optional hardened firmware modules, simulation tools, debug tools including Microchip’s Chiplink diagnostic tools, evaluation boards and reference designs, global support and a full suite of collateral.
Microchip’s Flashtec NVMe 3108 is available for sampling to qualified customers.
