DapuStor and Memblaze Target Global Expansion with State-of-the-Art Enterprise SSDs

Over the past few years, the growth of the enterprise solid-state drive (eSSD) market has outpaced the growth of the consumer SSD market. The requirements of AI servers for both training and inference have become a major driver on this front. In addition to the usual vendors such as Samsung, Solidigm, Micron, Kioxia and Western Digital serving cloud service providers (CSPs) and the likes of Facebook, a number of companies inside China are working to serve the growing eSSD market at home.

In our Microchip Flashtec 5016 review, we noted Longsys’ use of Microchip SSD controllers to prepare and sell enterprise SSDs under the FORESEE brand. Long before this, two companies – DapuStor and Memblaze – began producing eSSDs specifically targeting the Chinese market.

There are two driving forces behind the current eSSD market growth spurt. In terms of performance, the use of eTLC in the Gen 5 controller allows manufacturers to tout significant benefits over previous generation Gen 4 drives. At the same time, there is a battle for capacity as there is a race to cram as much NAND as possible into a single U.2/EDSFF package. QLC is used for this purpose, and at FMS 2024 we saw several of these 128 TB class eSSDs.

DapuStor and Memblaze use Marvell SSD controllers for their flagship drives. Their latest versions of the fifth generation era products use the Marvell Bravera SC5 controller. Like Flashtec controllers, they are not off-the-shelf solutions. Rather, the SSD vendor has significant flexibility to implement specific features for the desired target market.

At FMS 2024, DapuStor and Memblaze presented their latest solutions for the fifth generation market. Memblaze celebrated the sale of more than 150 thousand units of its fifth-generation flagship solution, the PBlaze7 7940, which includes Micron’s 232L 3D eTLC and Marvell’s Bravera SC5 controller. This SSD (available in capacities up to 30.72 TB) boasts 14 GB/s read/10 GB/s write speeds, as well as 2.8 MB/720 KB random read/write performance – all with a typical power consumption of less than 16 Tue There is also support for some NVMe features such as Software-Equipped Flash (SEF) and Zoned Namespace (ZNS), helped by Memblaze and Marvell receive “Best of Show” award in the “Most Innovative Customer Implementation” category.

DapuStor presented its current lineup (including the Haishen H5000 series with the same Bravera SC5 controller). In addition, the company demonstrated an unannounced experimental QLC SSD with a capacity of 61.44 TB. Despite the Haishen5 series label (all of its current members use eTLC NAND), this sample comes with QLC flash memory.

DapuStor has already invested resources in implementing flexible data placement (FDP) NVMe function firmware this QLC SSD. The company also held an interesting presentation on the use of CXL memory expansion to FTL storage for high-capacity enterprise SSDs. – although this is a future endeavor and is not related to any current product on the market.

Having established themselves in the Chinese market, DapuStor and Memblaze are looking to expand into other markets. Having products with the best performance and features in the growing eSSD segment will serve them well in this endeavor.