Enterprises are grappling with a performance plateau in storage systems, and artificial intelligence (AI) is the reason why.

The drive performance and energy requirements associated with running AI workloads have skyrocketed since the emergence of AI, and breakthroughs in use cases are pushing the curve higher. The crisis is particularly concentrated in the AI/ML and HPC market segments where critical workloads have mushroomed at a steady pace.

A combination of need for very high read and write speeds, more capacity and growing energy footprint of storage units has culminated into elevated OPEX in data centers. The cost of upgrading has left many cash-strapped, while for others the investment is simply beyond what they can afford.

The situation has sparked a wave of innovation in the SSD market, where in the last couple of years, a torrent of high-performance, low-energy drives have arrived at overlapping cadence.

Growing demand for this new crop of products indicates shift in storage requirements in the enterprise. Phison, a supplier of controllers for known SSD vendors like Solidigm, KIOXIA, Samsung, Micron and Kingston, is grabbing eyeballs in the SSD space for its fast-growing Pascari brand of SSDs. One of the company’s newest enterprise SSDs, the X200E, has been crowned “champion” for mixed workloads.

“This is the fastest enterprise SSD in the market today,” said Chris Ramseyer, director of technical marketing, while showcasing the Phison Pascari portfolio at the AI Infrastructure Field Day in California last month.

A TLC SSD, the X200 is a high-density, high-performance line of drives that uses PCIe Gen 5, delivering 14.8 GB/s of sequential read bandwidth and 8.7 GB/s of sequential write speed. The drives deliver 3.2 million IOPS of random read and 930,000 IOPS of random write speed.

“It’s very easy to reach 15 gigabytes per second. This is the only enterprise SSD on the market that can do that today,” Ramseyer emphasized. However, he also added that “we have to be conservative with that number because it has to go across all platforms.”

With capacity ranging from 1.6TB to up to 30.72 TB, the X200 is a product suitable for diverse workloads, especially AI projects where model training and inferencing demand deep capacity and blur-fast write and read bandwidths, respectively.

One of the highlights in the X200 is the much-improved queue depth (QD). In plain speak, queue depth refers to the number of input/output (I/O) requests a drive can perform simultaneously.

“For traditional enterprise, the queue depths are relatively low. But, now you’ve got data centers with thousands of GPUs hitting one or two storage boxes. Each GPU has like over 16,000 and above Tensor cores. They can all reach out back to the storage directly, so that will increase the queue depth performance.”

Compared to the last generation (X100), the X200 demonstrates 700% gains in low QD events (non-AI and legacy workloads) and a 60% improvement in high QD events which include AI and HPC workloads, Ramseyer told.

Added to that, the 24+ drives per system capacity of X200 offers reduced physical footprint and power consumption. “When you throw 24 drives in the system with each drive at QD1, the system is QD24. So essentially…the server can go and run more tasks with less power and do it faster,” he said.

In their benchmarks, TweakTown found that at QD16 and above, the X200E outruns parallel products from vendors like Solidigm, Kingston, Memblaze and DapuStor attaining over 1000k IOPS with a database workload that comprises 70% read and 30% write. Their lab tests also revealed that X200E hit sequential throughput of over 15,000 MB/s, “the highest ever recorded”.

Packed in slim form factors of U.2 and E3.S, the X200 drives come with a 5-year warranty.

Phison partners with VDURA to bring to market the V5000 series All Flash Appliance. The VDURA V5000 series ships with up to 12 units of the 30.72TB drive in 1 rack unit.

Phison’s Pascari portfolio also includes the Pascari AI-Series (aiDAPTIV+) for AI training, the ultra-capacity Data Center D-Series which includes the D205V, currently one of the fastest enterprise-grade SSDs in the market, as well as the energy-efficient SATA S-Series for legacy servers.