Airfield: Thor NVMe 2.0 controller based on RISC-V architecture

Main articles:

• Storage System
• Virtualization. Classification and applications

2022: NVMe 2.0 Controller Development

The company Aero disk"," Russian the developer and manufacturer of solutions in the field Data Storage and, virtualizations on March 1, 2022, announced the development of its own NVMe 2.0 controller with the project name "Tor."

NVMe is an access protocol to PCI Solid-State Drives Express bus connections. Solutions of this class allow to obtain low delays and efficient use of high parallelism-accumulators SSD. The transition to NVMe 2.0 as the latest transmission standard data is a global trend today.

In the mobile segment, NVMe drives have already become an industrial standard, and they are gaining a position in the server and storage segment, where the parameters of the speed of writing, searching and reading information are extremely important. According to IT Research, by 2025, the share of NVMe drives will reach 82% in the entire IT industry, they will be used everywhere, from the Internet of Things (IoT) to high-performance storage. The need for storage elements of the latter type, taking into account the growth in the volume of stored information, is estimated at billions of units (according to IDC).

The Aerodisk solution will provide spatial separation of memory (Multiple Names technology) and solve problems of logical isolation according to the degree of access and in order to improve the level of safety. Microcontrollers using the RISC-V processor architecture allow load balancing and redundancy, as well as media management at the driver, hypervisor, and storage levels.

Near-range storage systems with maximum throughput. PCIe speeds and NVMe 2.0 capabilities allow you to get not just a storage device, but a truly intelligent data management system, "said Vasily Shuteev, head of the Aerodisk design center.

A storage and virtualization system that will use media with such a controller will be able to dynamically change the size of the area for each user. Thus, the need to allocate a large area at a time disappears. Reducing the amount of unused memory provides significant savings in storage and data center resources. The controllers being developed also support hardware SR-IOV virtualization native to PCIe: SSD frees the hypervisor from address transformations.

To protect data integrity, the controller implements hardware RAID in flash memory, an adaptive LDPC error correction algorithm. The foundation of the solution is a system of dynamic compensation for inaccuracies in the process, as well as temperature and, as a result, temporary distortions.

{{quote 'As of March 2022, there are a little over a dozen companies in the world that produce controllers of this class. In Russia, this market segment is practically unoccupied, so we, as one of the representatives in the field of import substitution, decided to launch our own decision. These controllers will be used both in classic storage systems specially optimized for high-speed solid-state drives with the NVMe x8 PCI Express 4.0 interface, and clustered high-density systems for the latest generation hyperconvergent system AIRDISK vAIR, "said Aerodisk CEO Vyacheslav Volodkovich. }}