14 DAY TRIAL // Solid state drives aren't the sort of thing you would want to use for long-term applications, usually, but PMC-Sierra and Memblaze Technology might have overcome the issues brought about by limited write cycles.
That's what we can assume from their latest press release, considering how adamant they are about their new storage devices being suited for supercomputers and other hyperscale and Open Compute Project deployments.
Or perhaps they assume that companies, universities, and organizations running such applications will periodically replace their storage components.
In any case, it's not the lifespan of the SSDs that the two focus on in their press release, but the other benefits of their new SSDs, the Memblaze PBlaze4.
The Flashtec-based Memblaze PBlaze4 products
These solid state drives are PCI Express-based storage devices powered by PMC's Flashtec NVM Express (NVMe) controllers.
That means they have sequential speeds of 3.2 GB/s when reading and 2.5 GB/s when writing, which is a full GB/s more than the best ones out of the other PCI Express SSDs on the market.
And we should all keep in mind that there aren't many PCIe SSDs that can go above 1.5 GB/s. The few who exceed the 2 GB/s mark are anomalies. That should put into perspective just how remarkable the performance of the Memblaze PBlaze4 is.
On that note, the random 4K performance is of up to 850,000 I/Os per second (IOPS) for random read and 265,000 IOPS for random write.
Everything boils down to the lowest latency and lowest CPU load in the industry. It should be easy for a large computer equipped with these storage devices to access and process data swiftly, to say the least.
It's unclear how the SSDs will collaborate with GPU compute modules, but it can be assumed that the same benefits as for CPUs apply there.
Availability and pricing
The Memblaze PBlaze4 SSDs of up to 8 TB capacity (yes, 8 TB, more than all but the best HDDs on the market) and 16-channel / 32-channel controller chips will ship with dual port functionality from multiple NAND vendors. Unfortunately, retail availability probably won't occur, since these are made specifically for cloud data centers and other enterprise applications. Companies will have to place orders themselves, and negotiate prices.
