Redefining Data Redundancy and Data Scrubbing with RAID Offload

Data redundancy solutions (e.g., RAID or erasure code) are by nature compute intensive and consume high DRAM bandwidth in the write operation path. In particular, RAID solutions also contribute to CPU cache thrashing. With NVMe SSDs added to a system, read/write performance doubles with every PCIe generation, which shifts the performance bottlenecks to these data redundancy solutions, both hardware and software. To address this, KIOXIA is investigating a RAID offload technology orchestrated by an architecture that offloads compute and DRAM bandwidth to SSDs. RAID offload technology needs to be a scale out solution, so as the number of SSDs increase, performance can scale proportionally. It also needs to be extremely flexible for existing hardware and software RAID applications to meet the following criteria: maximize performance, address memory wall issues, optimize CPU core usage and DRAM bandwidth, RAID geometry agnostic, minimize TCO, and utilize the existing mature RAID stack and user interface.