Solidigm, the new big man in enterprise storage? Who is Solidigm? I believe that many people are not familiar with this seemingly unfamiliar brand, and even how to pronounce it, don't worry, let's take a look at the distribution of the market share of enterprise SSDs in the third quarter of 2021. According to the statistics of the research institute TrendFocus, in the third quarter of 2021, Samsung occupied the highest market share in the enterprise SSD market, while the second and third were Intel and SK Hynix, accounting for 15.2% and 8.6% of the market share, respectively. It's worth mentioning that the second and third places also made a big news at the end of 2020 - SK Hynix announced that it would spend $9 billion to acquire Intel's NAND flash memory and SSD business, and completed the first phase of work at the end of 2021 to form a new company.
▲ Enterprise SSD market share in the third quarter of 2021, it is clear that Intel and SK Hynix will have more strength to fight against Samsung after joining forces.
The name of this new company is called Solidigm, and it is obvious that based on the previous share of Intel and SK Hynix in the enterprise SSD market, their technology and product performance, it is not an exaggeration to call their combined Solidigm the new big man. The reason why the new company is named Solidigm can be said to be painstaking. The combination of the "solid-state" and "paradigm" names reflects Solidigm's commitment to creating a new paradigm for solid-state storage, providing quality customer service, and revolutionizing the storage industry. Solidigm's canonical reading is [saa-luh-dime].
Robert Crooke, former senior vice president and general manager of Intel Corporation's Nonvolatile Memory Solutions Division, became CEO of Solidigm.
Headquartered in San Jose, California, Solidigm employs nearly 2,000 people and has offices in 20 locations around the world. At present, Solidigm has set up branches in Beijing, Dalian, Shenzhen, Shanghai and other places, with a professional senior team covering product design and development, production support, sales, quality and reliability. At the same time, the CEO of Solidigm is still Robert Crooke, and I believe that readers who follow the Microcomputer report should be familiar with him, that is, the former senior vice president and general manager of Intel's non-volatile memory (NVM) solutions division. It can be said that whether it is from the composition of personnel, research and development and production, under the strong combination of Intel NAND flash memory and SK Hynix, Solidigm is ready for everything, so it is only natural that it can now launch its first enterprise-level SSD.
New SSD products for data center and enterprise applications
▲The main technical features of D7-P5520 and D7-P5620, of which the D7-P5620 designed for mixed workloads adopts a 2.5-inch U.2 form design, supporting three full disk writes per day, and the maximum optional capacity can reach 12.8TB. The D7-P5520 is available in four selectable formats for read-intensive and lightweight mixed workloads, with a maximum optional capacity of up to 15.36TB. However, only 1 full disk write per day is supported.
Solidigm introduced new SSD products D7-P5520 and D7-P5620 for data center and enterprise applications to further expand its performance-optimized D7 product family, and its naming convention continues Intel's enterprise storage products. Optimized for real-world compute and storage server workloads, these two SSDs offer a variety of form factors and scalable capacity options. At the same time, with less storage space and lower power consumption, both products achieve accelerated performance and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO). The D7-P5520 is designed for read-intensive and lightweight mixed workloads, while the D7-P5620 is designed for mixed workloads and is positioned higher.
▲D7-P5520 has U.2, 9.5mm E1. S、15mm E1. S、15mm E1. L Four optional forms for easy application in a wide range of computing and storage servers.
The D7 Series includes the industry's best PCIe 4.0 SSD family, offering different capacity options, multiple form factors, and optimized performance. Optimized for real-world workloads, the D7-P5520 and D7-P5620 reflect The industry insights that Solidigm has gained from its long-standing in-depth technology exchanges with leading cloud computing vendors, OEMs, and storage innovators. Users can confidently deploy D7-P5520 and D7-P5620 SSDs with consistent IOPS and QoS with near-zero performance degradation over the lifetime through a zero-tolerance approach to data errors during the design and validation process.
▲D7-P5520 main technical specifications, sequential read and write speed up to 7100MB/s, 4200MB/s, the highest 4K random read and write performance of 1.1 million IOPS, 220K IOPS, support 1 time per day full disk write, warranty time of 5 years.
▲D7-P5620 main technical specifications, sequential read and write speed up to 7100MB/s, 4200MB/s, the highest 4K random read and write performance of 1.1 million IOPS, 220K IOPS, although the performance data is the same, but its durability is better, support 3 times a day full disk write, warranty time is the same as 5 years.
Compared with Intel's previous generation dc p4510, the D7-P5520's 4K random read performance is up to 57% higher, 4K random write performance is up to 80% faster, and latency is reduced by up to 58%.
Compared with Intel's previous generation dc p4610, the D7-P5620's 4K random read performance is up to 56% higher, 4K random write performance is up to 53% faster, and latency is reduced by up to 76%.
David Dixon, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Solidigm Data Center Business Group, said: "Long-term in-depth technical exchanges with various industry sectors have given us unique user insights to continuously optimize our products. The D7-P5520 and D7-P5620 are the result of these insights, as well as generations of iterative optimization of 3D NAND and PCIe 4.0 products, allowing us to deliver best-in-class products to our customers and create a new paradigm for solid-state storage. "In particular, the total cost of ownership (TCO) of both SSDs was reduced through a two-pronged strategy of performance improvement and capacity expansion. For example, if an OEM needs to design a 2u server that supports 10 million IOPs, it can reduce storage space by up to 27% and power consumption by up to 20% compared to the previous generation of SSD products.
Both enterprise-class SSDs focus on improving low queue depth performance, after all, most workloads are lower than QD32 and running mixed workloads.
▲Both SSDs pay great attention to stability design, flash memory, SSD controller are designed by Solidigm itself, and add additional firmware checks to ensure that data can be stored correctly in the event of power failure, with complete end-to-end data path protection.
It has been adopted by enterprises before it was released
It is worth mentioning that although these two products have just been released, companies have begun to adopt D7-P5520, which is a well-known information technology company: ByteDance. ByteDance partnered with Solidigm early in product development and began validation of the D7-P5520. With excellent test results, the D7-P5520 was officially deployed on ByteDance in March 2022. Compared with its predecessor, the D7-P5520 has significantly improved capacity and performance, helping ByteDance's database and cloud software-defined storage businesses achieve a 33% performance improvement and significantly reduce their total cost of ownership. In addition, the Solidigm D7-P5520 will be used in the enterprise service of ByteDance's volcano engine.
In summary, we believe that although Solidigm is a new company in the field of enterprise storage, because behind it is actually the original Intel's NAND flash memory and SSD business unit, SK Hynix, so whether it is from the technical reserves, research and development strength, production capacity or sales channels, are very mature and complete, coupled with experienced management, I believe that with D7-P5520, D7-P5620 such excellent performance, outstanding stability of the products, Solidigm will make a lot of gains in the enterprise storage market.