Flash Storage Unleashed: Pliops Storage Processors for the Data Centric Era

Steve Fingerhut, President, introduces Pliops at Storage Field Day 21. The Pliops Storage Processor accelerates storage and reduces cost for nearly any flash workload, increasing performance, expanding capacity beyond in-system drives, adding data protection, and increasing endurance. The company is backed by SoftBank, Intel, Nvidia, Western Digital, and Xilinx. With data continuing to increase, companies are realizing that simply increasing the number of servers can’t keep up. Instead, Pliops aims to accelerate storage performance to allow data processing to scale more efficiently. The Pliops Storage Processor (PSP) accelerates nearly all flash-based workloads, including NoSQL, RDBMS, Analytics, and software-defined storage.

Fingerhut discusses this application with the Storage Field Day delegates and walks them through the functions of the PSP, which provides a key/value library API and NVMe block interface with thin provisioning, compression, erasure coding, and encryption. This PCIe card can be used in any standard server combined with any SSD and direct or disaggregated storage. Block storage performance is up to 7x higher, with latency dropping by 80% in a typical 70/30 random read/write application. In a database application, the PSP delivered 8x performance per core, with a 9x increase in TPC-C queries per second and 90% reduction in query completion latency. Another database applications saw QLC flash performing twice as fast as TLC, and MongoDB saw 3x capacity increase with a 2.6x throughput increase. Pliops even made Intel Optane SSD storage faster in MySQL TPC-C.