These same capabilities can be found in the original Radian Symphonic™ CFM technology that the Radian Zoned Namespaces implementation is based upon, and that won this same Most Innovative Technology award at FMS four years ago, in 2015.  This functionality ranges from configurable zones and isolated regions, to Idealized Flash and Relaxed Write Pointers, Decoupled Wear Leveling and NAND Maintenance, to Delegated Copy Move and several other specialized features.

Radian introduced the industry to the concept of Zoned Flash SSDs in 2015 with a presentation at the SNIA annual Storage Developer’s Conference (SDC), and shipped first evaluation units of its Zoned Flash drives to OEM customers in January 2018.  “Storage technology is advancing to new innovation with the new standard of Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) to improve the performance of SSDs and address a new architecture that diminishes the need for over-provisioning, decreases write amplification and reduces latency,” said Jay Kramer, Chairman of the Awards Program and President of Network Storage Advisors Inc.

Radian has pioneered Cooperative Flash Management (CFM), and the company’s Zoned Namespaces implementation follows the same host/device model as earlier Symphonic SSDs.  This enables the host to control data placement while the SSD abstracts lower level media management, including geometry and vendor-specific NAND attributes (‘Idealized Flash’).  Flash management processes such as garbage collection, wear leveling, and NAND maintenance are executed by the device, under cooperative host control, and hence performed deterministically.