Storage Switzerland is attending Storage Networking World (SNW) again this fall and as in shows past we will be providing quick notes on our conversations throughout the show.

Anobit is a flash storage provider for enterprise and mobile markets. The Genesis family of SSDs consists of 6Gb/s SAS 2.0 or SATA 3.0 compliant drives in the 2.5” form-factor, available in 100GB, 200GB and 400GB capacities. The Genesis-S series drives produce 58,000 IOPS using a 4K random read and 40,000 IOPS using a 4K random write. The Genesis-T series drives produce over 70,000 read and 40,000 write IOPS, again, using a 4K random read and write. Both SATA and SAS drives use a 25nm MLC NAND flash - that’s commercial-grade MLC. This allows them to keep costs down, compared with SLC or even eMLC NAND flash.

The way they can make commercial MLC work in this use case is by greatly increasing its endurance. According to Anobit the 50,000+ Program/Erase (P/E) cycles they support is almost 20x the 3,000 P/E cycles that standard MLC NAND can support. This produces a write endurance of over a petabyte of data, according to Anobit, based on 4TBs written each workday over a five year period. Their technology behind this is called “Memory Signal Processing” (MSP).

Anobit’s MSP uses digital signal processing technologies to pull more intelligence out of the NAND flash and provide a deeper insight about the condition of the substrate. This gives them to ability to better distinguish bit errors and to know when a cell has reached a point where it won't reliably store data. This is long past the point that traditional error correction code (ECC) technologies, used by the flash industry at large, are still effective.

Essentially this means they can detect problems in flash cells when they're much older, allowing them to extend the usable life of MLC flash significantly beyond other manufacturers. The net of this ability is that Anobit's flash products have much longer endurance than comparable products from other vendors. They claim commercial-grade MLC endurance comparable to that of SLC flash from other manufacturers. Theoretically, this would enable users to replace SLC flash with the more economical MLC products.

Storage Swiss Take

In the flash space a big driver of adoption rate is cost. To this end, the industry has created MLC and eMLC NAND products to provide an economical alternative to SLC. The issue with MLC is handling the increased amount of errors it creates and providing a useful life that’s long enough to support the use cases that companies have. If Anobit can actually use MLC to produce SLC endurance they may have taken a big step in reducing SSD costs.