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In March 2023, we reported that Pure Storage deliberate to promote 300TB SSDs inside three years.
Whereas 300TB is certainly a formidable quantity of storage, the corporate has revealed that it expects to have the ability to ship 1200TB SSD modules… ultimately.
Shawn Rosemarin, Pure VP for R&D, defined to Blocks & Recordsdata that the constraints of DRAM forestall business off-the-shelf (COTS) SSDs from exceeding 30TB capacities. Usually, he stated, 1GB of DRAM is required for each 1TB of uncooked NAND capability, which implies a 30TB drive would require 30GB of DRAM. The issue arises when contemplating bigger capacities, as the quantity of DRAM required matches and even exceeds the quantity present in present servers.
300TB and past
Rosemarin highlighted three essential points with utilizing extra DRAM. Firstly, DRAM fails extra continuously than NAND. Secondly, DRAM is considerably dearer. Lastly, DRAM’s vitality effectivity is far decrease, resulting in larger vitality consumption.
DRAM is required for the Flash Translation Layer (FTL) software program, which serves as firmware within the SSD’s controller. It permits incoming knowledge to be written to completely different bodily flash pages whatever the supposed logical block. The DRAM holds the FTL mappings and metadata for this course of, making it essential for SSD operation.
Nevertheless, as SSD capacities improve, the price of DRAM turns into a bigger portion of the general SSD value.
Pure Storage’s answer to this downside is its Direct Flash Modules (DFMs), which don’t depend on DRAM on the drive stage. As an alternative, the FTL is finished on the system-wide stage in Pure’s controller and its software program. This methodology, Pure claims, DFMs to extend capability a lot quicker than off-the-shelf SSDs.
The corporate plans to launch 150TB DFMs in 2025 and in its roadmap it says “by the point the business is broadly transport 25-30TB HDDs and 30-60TB SSDs in 2026, we count on to ship 300TB DFMs.”
That’s simply the beginning. Though he didn’t even trace at a timescale for it, Rosemarin advised Blocks & Recordsdata, “Now we have each intention to scale past 300, to 600, and even to 1.2 petabyte per DFM.”
It received’t be low cost in fact. Final yr, the agency stated the price-per-gigabyte of its 300TB drive could be “lower than” $0.15/GB. Performing some easy calculations, and never taking into consideration inflation and all the things else that may happen earlier than it even involves market, a 1.2PB drive could be priced effectively north of $180,000.
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