FPGA-based NVMe accelerators to include EDSFF

Craig Petrie, Vice President Marketing at BittWare, said: “Our investment and collaboration with Eideticom will accelerate the creation of NVMe-based Computational Storage solutions and help our customers innovate with lower risk and cost. 

“We are extending BittWare’s leadership in this new market by sharing details of two advanced products, samples of which will be on display at Flash Memory Summit, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, booth #844. The 250-E1S is the world’s first FPGA NVMe accelerator adhering to the E1.S EDSFF standard. 

“The second is the 250-HMS which was developed in conjunction with IBM. It leverages the high performance of OpenCAPI's 25Gbps high speed serial interface, providing an exceptional combination of technology and performance for database acceleration in the emerging storage class memory area”.

Roger Bertschmann, CEO, Eideticom, added: “We are delighted to count Molex as investors in Eideticom. Collaborating with the BittWare division of Molex will help accelerate development of our NoLoad Computational Storage Processors and provide the market with exciting new options for solving challenging data processing problems. With Molex’s help, Eideticom can scale more efficiently to better service our growing global customer base.”

These open architecture NVMe platforms can be wholly programmed by customers developing in-house capabilities or delivered as ready-to-run, pre-configured solutions featuring Eideticom’s NoLoad IP. When pre-programmed with NoLoad, each Computational Storage Service is presented to the host operating system as a regular NVMe Namespace and binds to the standard NVMe driver. 

This avoids the need for customers to develop or use proprietary drivers or software stacks. Instead, customers can continue using their preferred Linux, Windows or VMWare operating systems and host-based applications.

The 250-E1S is a PCIe Computational Storage Processor (CSP) conforming to the E1.S SFF-TA-1006 EDSFF specification. The 250-E1S features a fully programmable FPGA directly coupled to local DDR4 memory. This energy-efficient, flexible compute node can be wholly programmed by customers or delivered pre-configured with Eideticom’s NoLoad IP. The 250-E1S is front-serviceable in a 1U chassis and can be mixed in with storage units in the same server, allowing users to mix-and-match storage and acceleration.

The 250-HMS is a database accelerator adhering to the full-height, half-length, single-width PCIe form factor. Latest generation FPGA/MPSoC technology is tightly coupled to a mix of industry-proven memory technologies:

• Samsung low latency zNAND as the primary backing media to achieve high capacity and performance.
• DRAM as a cache to maintain low effective latency for compatible workloads.
• MRAM to persist key information if power is unexpectedly lost.

As with storage-class memory, the 250-HMS strikes a balance between NAND and DRAM for both performance and price, allowing customers options not previously possible. The 250-HMS does not displace main memory DRAM nor does it require DRAM DIMMs on the same memory channel, allowing systems to achieve higher overall memory capacity without sacrificing bandwidth.