HighPoint NVMe Performance Architecture

For nearly 3 decades, HighPoint Technologies, Inc. has been driving force in the Storage and Connectivity Industry. Throughout the years, HighPoint has continuously released cutting-edge products that push these industries forward.

Though we offer an extensive selection of products and solutions for all major storage and connectivity interfaces, we specialize in all things NVMe.

NVMe Storage and Connectivity Expertise

It’s no secret that HighPoint builds the industry’s fastest NVMe RAID controllers. Our game changing NVMe hardware architecture and Cross-Sync RAID technology enables administrators to link dual SSD7xxx controllers to support upwards of 120TB of storage at speeds of up to, and even beyond, 55,000MB/s!

And recently, we’ve expanded our NVMe portfolio to include a complete range of HBA solutions, which are perfectly suited for applications that employ Software-Defined Storage solutions such as Vmware vSAS, Microsoft S2D and Linux CEPH.

While our industry proven RAID technology and expert driver development capabilities perfectly illustrate our storage expertise, one may be tempted to overlook the fact that HighPoint has a long and storied history as a hardware engineering firm and manufacturer. We cut our teeth in the early days of the IDE/ATA era, and were the first to design and manufacture RAID capable ATA33 and ATA controller chips (yes, HighPoint used to design and manufacture chipsets!) that could be integrated into commercially available mainboards. We shipped millions of these solutions to major motherboard manufactures, and later entered the marketplace as a stand-alone solutions provider, with the debut of our RocketRAID series of PCIe controllers.

Our hardware engineering expertise, combined with our industry proven RAID engine and software solutions.

Built for Speed

Unlike most competing products, HighPoint NVMe solutions are capable of fully saturating x16 lanes of PCIe Gen3 (3.0) or Gen4 (4.0) host bandwidth. This is due to our highly flexible, performance focused PCB architecture, which was designed in-house and is unique to our hardware solutions.

Our hardware engineering expertise enable SSD7xxx NVMe RAID AICs and Rocket 1500/1000 Series HBA to incorporate and fully exploit the capabilities of high-performance PCIe Switch technology.

SSD7500 and Rocket 1500 Series SSD7000 and Rocket 1000 Series

These PCIe Switch Chipsets provide as many as 32 dedicated PCIe lanes, while supporting as many as 48 independent devices. Most consider this type of technology as overkill for a single-card solution. However, HighPoint is no stranger to this design philosophy – we simply saw it as a way to enhance an already superior solution.

Our NVMe hardware architecture enables each controller card to operate independent of the host hardware platform, and allocate as much as x4 lanes per NVMe device port; this ensures that all x8 or x16 lanes worth of bandwidth are available at all times, even if multiple ports are not in use.

This is a key advantage of HighPoint’s PCB design; bandwidth is assigned automatically, and can be adjusted on the fly. This ability lends credence to the “Intelligent” moniker that is associated with these AICs.

To further illustrate the advantages of this architecture, consider the current state of your average NVMe PCIe controller.

In truth, the vast majority of NVMe PCIe controllers are essentially just adapter cards – most are only PCIe x8 devices, and either distribute lanes equally across all ports, or defer to the system mainboard for PCIe allocation (this requirement is known as Bifurcation). In either case, performance bandwidth is squandered unless all channels/ports are occupied and in use.

If you want to push your system to the max, and ensure that power gets channeled to your target application, don’t waste your time with a simple adapter solution. And don’t simply shop around for a Switch Chipset based solution either – just because it has the chipset, doesn’t mean it was designed to use the switch component.

HighPoint SSD7xxx Series RAID AICs and Rocket 1500/1000 Series HBAs don’t take shortcuts – they were designed to take full advantage of each hardware component and deliver max throughput, regardless of platform.