Future Wei Technologies, Inc.

Yansong Wang

Xiaobing Lee

Ting Li

Yong Tai Chen

Michael Young

System and method for a unified memory and network controller for an all-flash array (AFA) storage blade in a distributed flash storage clusters over a fabric network. The unified memory and network controller has 3-way control functions including unified memory buses to cache memories and DDR4-AFA controllers, a dual-port PCIE interconnection to two host processors of gateway clusters, and four switch fabric ports for interconnections with peer controllers (e.g., AFA blades and/or chassis) in the distributed flash storage network. The AFA storage blade includes dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM) configured as data read/write cache buffers, and flash memory DIMM devices as primary storage. Remote data memory access (RDMA) for clients via the data caching buffers is enabled and controlled by the host processor interconnection(s), the switch fabric ports, and a unified memory bus from the unified controller to the data buffer and the flash SSDs.

RDMA-SSD dual-port unified memory and network controller

As a solution to the type of problems noted above, this disclosure provides novel methods and systems that include dual-port solid-state drive (SSD) DIMM devices to provide primary storage capabilities with very low latency and better availability of DDR4 devices. The dual-port DDR4-SSD flash memory devices guarantee primary storage devices still accessible with one CPU or network failure. The novel DDR4 memory bus devices may be used not only for memory media and storage device buffers, but also to allow two CPUs to share data stored in flash SSD chips and to greatly improve DDR4 bus efficiency and bus utilizations by block accesses and eliminate PCIE-DMA data transfers. Through the features of the claimed subject matter described herein, dual-port DDR4-DIMM memory devices can be achieved that provide an All-Flash-Array storage system with substantially higher reliability, availability, and performance over conventional SATA/SAS-SSD, PCIE-SSD, and NVME-SSD solutions.

Growing community of inventors

Hangzhou, China

Yansong Wang