The Heart of FlashCore Technology

So, it’s the 1980s or 1990s and you are building a solid state storage device with RAM. You can build it from scratch or you can take a computer with RAM, HDD and processors and a motherboard and turn it into a solid state storage device with a little bit of software. Which do you choose? If you’re in a hurry and have a short term view on the market, you take the fast way. How many companies built RAM solid state storage devices out of computers? Many, but zero that are still in business. Why are they out of business? Inferior product performance, inferior product cost structure, difficult to iterate without real engineering talent? All are reasonable answers. Many had their time in the spotlight but all disappear into history.

When the engineering team at Texas Memory Systems had to make this decision they did what any self-respecting engineering team would do, they designed a solid state storage device from scratch. No kidding. They never made the RAM chips, but they made just about everything else. Why would you do this? I wish you could have worked with some of the Texas Memory System customers in these days. Their interactions with the engineering team are nearly legendary around here. Could it be that customers would complain about a few microseconds when the rest of the world was dealing in 10s of milliseconds? There were and they did. And these engineers reacted and tuned and shaved off latency.

And that is where the story is kind of awesome, those engineers who dealt with those customers, those engineers are still at the heart, at the core, of the IBM engineering team for FlashSystem today. Now when someone comes in with a great idea, the first questions from these core engineers are what happens to the latency, what happens to the response time curve, how can we reduce the impact? This is not just an engineering goal, this is our engineering culture, the DNA that makes our products what they are.

So in marketing, we call it FlashCore Technology and we even subject it to another descriptor called Hardware Accelerated I/O but you know now that is really a lie. The core doesn’t start with Flash, it starts with people and a culture built meeting the demands of the most demanding customers in the world.

If you are looking for the technical depth in FlashCore look here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2015 at 3:03 pm and is filed under SSD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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