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Toshiba America Electronic Components, which has been getting more and more granular with its products by mapping them directly to new-gen use cases, on Aug. 8 debuted a new, all-flash big data analytics platform and a set of new solid-state drives to boot.
The Irvine, California-based division of Japan’s Toshiba Corp. introduced the Flashmatrix analytics platform plus its new BG series solid-state drives.
Flashmatrix is aimed specifically at the growing need for real-time, streaming analytics in distributed systems targeted at high data-intensive applications in manufacturing, finance, medical and security.
Last January, TAEC launched a set of new SSDs optimized specifically for read-heavy apps, such as web servers, data warehousing, media streaming and video-on-demand. Flashmatrix fits the same specifics-oriented use-case mold as the others.
The new generation of superconverged infrastructure features integrated compute, storage and network elements optimized for high performance. With its unusual architecture of NAND flash memory arranged in a matrix, Flashmatrix enables multiple data sets to be accessed in parallel and scaled linearly.
Using the matrix design, all of the NAND flash memory is shared by every CPU, allowing for flexibility and high performance. The entire platform is in a 2U enclosure and offers linear rack-scale scalability. Flashmatrix is optimally designed for low-power consumption.
“Big data processing can face multiple problems in scaling, latency and power as the customer demands increase,” said Ralph Schmitt, executive of system development at TAEC. “Flashmatrix addresses each of those issues to create a system that is a true solution for analytics processing by offering low-power-consumption, parallel processing to reduce system latency, card-level scaling and a large non-volatile memory space shared by all CPUs.”
Toshiba’s BG solid-state drives are amazingly small, with a surface area 95 percent less than conventional 2.5-inch serial ATA (SATA) storage devices and 82 percent smaller than M.2 Type 22806.
The 3-bit-per-cell TLC (triple-level cell) BG series condenses both the controller and NAND flash memory in a single 16mm x 20mm BGA package, which enables device manufacturers to use the extra space inside the laptop for larger batteries.
The three-dimensional (3D) stacked-cell structure makes it possible to accommodate up to 512GB of storage capacity in this high-performance and compact form factor, Schmitt said.
TAEC will showcase Flashmatrix at Booth 407 at the 2016 Flash Memory Summit, taking place Aug. 9-11 in Santa Clara, California. The company’s Shigeo (Jeff) Ohshima, from Memory Design and Application Engineering, and Yoichiro Tanaka, a Senior Fellow, will be keynoting at the summit with their presentation, “New 3D Flash Technologies Offer Both Low Cost and Low Power Solutions,” Aug. 9, from noon to 12:30 p.m. Pacific time.
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