At Storage Switzerland we have been covering the move to memory channel storage for the last six months. It is the next logical upgrade from drive-attached and PCIe-attached flash storage. By putting the flash directly on the memory bus traditional storage latency is almost completely eliminated. This not only allows flash to become an even higher performing storage area it also allows flash to be considered as a DRAM alternative.
On January 16th IBM became the first server manufacturer to announce support for memory channel storage. Memory channel storage can be considered the ultimate way to deliver server side flash performance since it reduces latency by 3x, compared with flash on a typical PCIe card. More importantly, memory channel storage latency is more consistent than latency in PCIe architectures, consistency that’s critical for predictable application performance. The memory channel based exFlash is on a bus that is dedicated to memory, whereas PCIe SSDs have to share their bus with other adapters, like storage controllers and network interface cards.
The exFlash modules themselves look very similar to a DRAM DIMM, except that these modules have flash memory instead of DRAM. This means greater memory capacity per DIMM slot and that the data stored on these modules have the ability to survive a power loss. The result is that exFlash also allows for significantly higher flash capacity per server. As an example, an IBM X6 server can support more than 12TB of flash storage internally with memory channel storage.
IBM has a full compliment of software to go along with the exFlash, including: WriteNow, an advanced write caching software solution; Direct Data Accelerator, a customized application tuning that can increase overall throughput; and FlashCache Storage Accelerator, software that automatically learns your workload in real-time.
Storage Swiss Take
Customers install server side flash solutions specifically to address performance problems. For most environments every additional ‘ounce’ of that performance can generate an additional ‘pound’ of revenue. Memory channel storage is clearly the next frontier in server side flash acceleration. Its 3X reduction in latency can produce many more ounces of performance and its density allows that performance to be achieved at a more cost effective price.
For more on memory channel storage attend our webinar “The Final Latency Frontier”
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George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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