This is an era of data explosion. Smartphones, smart homes, IoT devices, car networking devices, and Internet APPs: all of them are generating data all the time. Plus the application and popularity of emerging technologies such as 5G, AI, artificial intelligence, etc., they completely triggered the data growth in the new era. When a user uses a 5G smartphone and participates in a shopping festival promotion on an e-commerce platform...In this series of operations, the smartphone’s local device, 5G base station, 5G operator data center, e-commerce APP data center, etc., all need to process data. An error in one of the links will result failure to achieve a sparse and basic operation.

When tens or even hundreds of millions of people across the country are performing such operations at the same time, the pressure faced by the data center is much more than hundreds of millions of times. Therefore, the storage equipment in the data center needs to be changed to meet not only the basic operations such as data storage, reading, and writing, but also to enhance workload distribution, perfect the performance monitoring system, provide professional problem location and repair solution, and optimize cost expenditure to adapt to the bigger challenges brought by the surge of data and business.

1.How to carry out hardware and software collaboration to improve performance.

2. Adapt different workloads according to different application characteristics.

3.The Host can control the data path and data placement to achieve better service quality.

4.Quickly locate and solve online problems.

5.Cost optimization

To solve the above problems, Open channel SSD came into being. Combined with customer storage engine optimization, it successfully meets customer needs and becomes the industry's first commercial product. Open Channel SSD is a special type of SSD that does not implement a Flash Translation Layer (FTL) in the firmware of the storage device, but instead transfers the management of the physical solid-state storage to the host of the data center server. Thus data management is performed on the Host, while media management is performed on the Device. It is also due to this unique architecture that Open Channel SSDs can be optimized directly from the system level, not just from the Device.
The unique architecture allows the Host to dynamically adjust the garbage collection policy, optimize the data management process, cut physical address addressing, garbage collection/wear-leveling, and simplify NAND management according to the actual situation of specific application scenarios. It improves business application performance while significantly reducing response latency.
Open Channel SSD Solution Features:

1.Flexible design: The flexible firmware and hardware design enables the Host to focus on data management and the Device to focus on media management.

2.Simple architecture: Host and Device cooperate, making the architecture of the storage system more concise and clear.

3.Reduce software overhead: Uses in conjunction with the customer's upper-layer applications, moving the entire I/O path to user space.

4.Adapt the kernel mode and user mode simultaneously: Allowing applications to use SSDs as a general-purpose block device, covering most of the traditional applications, and providing customized user mode FTL solutions.

5. Almost "Zero Error": Avoid bit errors, read disturbance, stall, program failures, and other errors; during operation, the Device records as much error information as possible and provides comprehensive error avoidance and repair solutions.

Enhancements by using Shannon Open Channel SSD products:
The Open Channel SSD with upper layer customer software optimization provides a better solution for the data center business. In addition to the basic I/O performance optimization, Open Channel SSD is equipped with a customer storage engine to jointly optimize diverse business scenarios of the cloud database. Moreover, when supporting cloud database business, the Shannon Open Channel SSD products have better performance and consistency than standard hard disks, meeting customer business needs in all aspects and improving customer satisfaction.
Below are the performance and consistency test results under two application scenarios. The green one is the Open Channel SSD and the red one is a standard disk.
Cloud database application scenario A:
Take the e-commerce promotion festival as an example, in order to buy their favorite goods at the best price, most users often need to place their orders and pay precisely at 0:00 AM. For the data center of the e-commerce platform, there will be a large influx of data at this time. As you can see from the data in the table, the data point distribution of Open Channel SSD is denser, which means that its data fluctuation is smaller, enabling each user who places orders to get feedback in a very short time. The fluctuation of the standard disk is larger. The result is that some users place orders faster and others place orders slower, failing to purchase with insufficient stock. This will affect the user experience of the e-commerce platform.
Cloud database application scenario B:
When multiple users are reading and writing data at the same time, for example, when a user places an order, the merchant needs to read both the user data and the inventory to adjust flexibly. Open Channel SSD also maintains excellent stability in this scenario, and its performance is better than that of the standard disk when reading and writing at the same time, bringing better shopping experiences to customers. The standard disk is not only slower but also less stable when reading and writing at the same time.

In short, Open Channel SSDs will provide competitive products and optimized solutions with better performance, quality, and cost for data centers in the data explosion era. Open Channel SSD products have been installed in many mega data centers in China. With the excellent product advantages, flexible market strategies, years of technology accumulation, and support from Silicon Motion Technology, we will continue to launch storage products and solutions to meet data center and enterprise applications.