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STORAGE www.postmagazine.com 21 POST SEPT/OCT 2021 important than for recording in the field and for content where higher data rates are less critical. Companies such as Angelbird, Crucial, Panasonic, Sony, SanDisk (WDC) and Lexar offer flash-based media for content capture applications. As the size of video files increase, performance and latency become more important. Multi-channel raw 4K and 8K video post production storage perfor- mance and latency requirements exceed the capability of HDD-only storage systems. With declining NAND flash prices, storage systems with flash-based SSDs are becoming primary storage for many applications, with hard disk drive-based systems often used for secondary storage. Figure 2: Percentage of various recording media in professional video cameras NAND flash-based SSDs, especially with NVMe interfaces, working on the PCIe computer bus, have become the dominant SSD interface. As a conse- quence, NVMe SSDs are competitive with SAS SSDs. NVMe avoids the built-in legacy overhead of SATA and SAS interfaces, allowing more of the internal performance of flash memory chips to be available to the PCIe bus. NVMe SSDs are available from many companies, including Intel, Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory) Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix, Seagate and Western Digital. NVMe enabling technology is available from companies such as AMD, Huawei, Intel, Marvell and Mellanox (now part of Nvidia). Today, NVMe access is mostly storage-based (file or block), but there are software stacks that could allow direct memory-like access for NVMe storage. This will be especially useful with very fast emerging non-volatile memory technologies that could replace traditional volatile memories, such as Intel's Optane technology (which is also available on DIMM modules for the computer memory bus). The NVMe protocol can also be transported over fabric networks. This is called NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF). Storage systems are now available using NVMe-oF, including Fibre Channel, Infiniband and especially Ethernet networks, enabling features such as remote direct memory access (RDMA). NVMe-oF will help disaggregate traditional computing architectures with new ways to pool storage that includes putting microcomputer accelerators closer to memory in order to carry out some compute functions and reducing the compute load on CPUs. NVMe-oF is moving us closer to a more storage-centric computing architecture that could transform rendering and other video production tasks that require high resolution and high frame rate. Many storage companies (hardware and software) serving the media and entertainment market are now offering NVMe and NVMe-oF storage solu- tions, including Dell, EditShare, HPE, IBM, NetApp, Pavilion Data, Quantum and Qumulo. There are also companies adding computing capability to NVMe SSDs or in the NVMe fabric to create computational storage solutions, such as NGD, Samsung, Kioxia and Eideticom. Flash memory and other solid-state storage will play an increasing role in M&E storage in future years, although HDDs and magnetic tape will dominate lower cost bulk storage of media content. In particular, we expect the use of SSDs in post production to increase significantly in the next few years. Figure 3 shows our projections for flash memory revenues in 2025 for various M&E applications. Figure 3. Projections for flash memory revenue in 2025 MEMORY POOLS IN MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT Similar to the way that NVMe-oF is leading to new ways to disaggregate and pool storage in order to enable more capable virtual machines and containers for various applications, new memory interconnect technologies will allow changing the way that computers use memory. In particular, computer systems using the CXL protocols will start to appear in 2022. CXL is a switched network for heterogeneous memory (memories with various latencies and performance) and compute accelerators that allows creating pools of "far" memory and local processing in the CXL network that can be shared and allocated to virtual machines and containers to help with future media workflows. In 2021 Samsung introduced a CXL enabled Double Data Rate (DDR) DRAM memory module. The CXL industry trade group says that more memory companies will provide CXL-enabled memories and initial products based upon CXL will appear next year from computer system vendors. CXL provides pooled "far" memory (memory attached to CPUs using a switched network and therefore having some added latency). There is also development of new ways to provide more capacity and faster performance for "near" memory (memory directly attached to CPUs with lower latency). Most computer systems have used DDR near memory interconnects or high bandwidth memory (HBM). DDR is a parallel interface and increasing its per- formance and capacity becomes increasingly harder with each generation due to the increased capacitive load. Current computer products ship with DDR4 interconnects, and DDR5 products should become common in the market in the next few years. HBM offers high performance using stacks of up to 12 DRAM chips, but HBM is more expensive than DDR and limited in the storage capacity it can support. The Open Memory Interface available on IBM Power 10 processors and some Floating Point Gate Arrays (FPGAs) can offer performance approaching that of HBM (64GB/s per OMI channel) and memory capacity for near memory that greatly exceeds DDR and HBM (up to 256GB per channel). These new near and far memory technologies will enable more memory-centric computing for further improving the performance of current media workflows and enabling more extensive 360 degree video stitching, high resolution and high frame rate rendering, and other important media and entertainment applications.