“Boost Business Potential with Pascari: AI-Powered Brand Acceleration and Digital Growth Strategie

At FMS 2024, Phison really flexed their muscles in the enterprise and datacenter space, showcasing their high-end SSDs and PCIe retimer solutions alongside their more familiar consumer products. As a controller and silicon vendor, Phison’s expertise lies in working with drive partners to bring their innovations to market. Their enterprise partnerships, like the well-known tie-up with Seagate for the X1 series, demonstrate their commitment to delivering top-notch storage solutions.

One of the standout demos at FMS was Phison’s showcase of their Gen 5 X2 platform, a follow-up to the Gen 5 X1 that debuted last year. Since Seagate was focusing on their HAMR ramp, Phison decided to go solo with the X2’s qualification process, which not only allowed them to streamline their development but also to create a new brand: Pascari.

Pascari is all about making Phison’s enterprise SSDs more accessible to end-users, with product lines targeting different use-cases. From high-performance drives in the X series to boot drives in the B series, Phison has got it covered. And with their AI series, they’re catering to businesses that need extreme endurance for their workloads – up to 100 DWPD, to be exact.

The D200V Gen 5 SSD, for instance, boasts a whopping 61.44 TB capacity point (with a 122.88 TB drive planned under the same line). Though it uses QLC NAND, which slows down sequential writes to 2.1 GBps, this is designed for read-heavy workloads.

The X200, on the other hand, is a Gen 5 eTLC drive with up to 8.7 GBps sequential writes, available in capacities up to 30.72 TB. You can get it in read-centric (1 DWPD) or mixed workload (3 DWPD) configurations.

These enterprise-grade drives come with standard features like power-loss protection and FIPS certification. As for future firmware updates, Phison hinted that newer NVMe features like flexible data placement might make the cut.

100 GBps with Dual HighPoint Rocket 1608 Cards and Phison E26 SSDs

Though not strictly an enterprise demo, Phison showed off 100 GBps+ sequential reads and writes using a desktop workstation. The trick? Installing two HighPoint Rocket 1608A add-in cards and arranging the 16 M.2 drives in a RAID 0 configuration. This setup, which is a collaboration between HighPoint Technology and Phison, promises to deliver some exciting performance numbers.

aiDAPTIV+ Pro Suite for AI Training

One of the more fascinating demos at Phison’s booth was their aiDAPTIV+ Pro suite. They demonstrated a 40 DWPD SSD for use with Chia last year, and this year, they upped the ante with an SSD that can withstand 60 DWPD (similar to Micron and Solidigm’s SLC-based cache drives). By adding middleware to ensure sequential workloads, they managed to push the endurance rating up to 100 DWPD. This is part of their AI training suite designed for small businesses and medium enterprises that can’t afford DGX workstations or on-premises fine-tuning.

By retraining models using these AI SSDs as an extension of GPU VRAM, businesses can achieve significant TCO benefits, as they can swap costly AI training-specific GPUs with off-the-shelf RTX GPUs. The licensing model is tied to the purchase of AI-series SSDs, which come with Gen 4 x4 interfaces in U.2 or M.2 form-factors.