Emerging Memories Branch Out – a Q&A

Our recent SNIA Persistent Memory SIG webinar explored in depth the latest developments and futures of emerging memories – now found in multiple applications both as stand-alone chips and embedded into systems on chips. We got some great questions from our live audience, and our experts Arthur Sainio, Tom Coughlin, and Jim Handy have taken the time to answer them in depth in this blog. And if you missed the original live talk, watch the video and download the PDF here. Q:  Do you expect Persistent Memory to eventually gain the speeds that exist today with DRAM? A:  It appears that that has already happened with the hafnium ferroelectrics that SK Hynix and Micron have shown.Ferroelectric memory is a very fast technology and with very fast write cycles there should be every reason for it to go that way. With the hooks that are in CXL™,  though, that shouldn’t be that much of a Read More

So Just What Is An SSD?

It seems like an easy enough question, “What is an SSD?” but surprisingly, most of the search results for this get somewhat confused quickly on media, controllers, form factors, storage interfaces, performance, reliability, and different market segments.  The SNIA SSD SIG has spent time demystifying various SSD topics like endurance, form factors, and the different classifications of SSDs – from consumer to enterprise and hyperscale SSDs. “Solid state drive is a general term that covers many market segments, and the SNIA SSD SIG has developed a new overview of “What is an SSD? ,” said Jonmichael Hands, SNIA SSD Special Interest Group (SIG)Co-Chair. “We are committed to helping make storage technology topics, like endurance and form factors, much easier to understand coming straight from the industry experts defining the specifications.”   The “What is an SSD?” page offers a concise description of what SSDs do, how they perform, how they connect, and also provides a jumping off point for more in-depth clarification of the many aspects of SSDs. It joins an ever-growing category of 20 one-page “What Is?” answers that provide a clear and concise, vendor-neutral definition of often- asked technology terms, a description of what they are, and how each of these technologies work.  Check out all the “What Is?” entries at https://www.snia.org/education/what-is And don’t miss other interest topics from the SNIA SSD SIG, including  Total Cost of Ownership Model for Storage and SSD videos and presentations in the SNIA Educational Library. Your comments and feedback on this page are welcomed.  Send them to askcmsi@snia.org. The post So just what is an SSD? first appeared on SNIA Compute, Memory and Storage Blog.

How Many IOPS? Users Share Their 2017 Storage Performance Needs

New on the Solid State Storage website is a whitepaper from analysts Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates and Jim Handy of Objective Analysis which details what IT manager requirements are for storage performance. The paper examines how requirements have changed over a four-year period for a range of applications, including databases, online transaction processing, cloud and storage services, and scientific and engineering computing.  Read More

Attend Live – or Live Stream – SNIA’s Persistent Memory Summit January 18

by Marty Foltyn

SNIA’s Persistent Memory Summit makes its fifth annual appearance in Silicon Valley next Wednesday, January 18, and if you are in the vicinity of the Westin San Jose, you owe it to yourself to check it out. PMSummitLogo (2)

SNIA is well known for its technology-focused, no vendor-hype conferences, and this one-day event will feature 12 presentations and two panels that will “level set” the discussion, review persistent memory usage, describe applications incorporating PM available today, discuss the infrastructure and implementation, and provide a vision of the “next generation” of persistent memory.

You’ll meet speakers from SNIA member companies Intel, Micron, Microsemi, VMware, Red Hat, Microsoft, AgigA Tech, Western Digital, and Spin Transfer.  Live demonstrations of persistent memory solutions will be featured from Summit underwriters Intel and the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative, and Summit sponsors Microsemi, VMware, AgigA Tech, SMART Modular, and Spin Transfer.

Registration is complimentary but limited  -visit http://www.snia.org/pm-summit for the complete agenda and how to sign up.  And, if your travels don’t permit you to attend in person, the Persistent Memory Summit will be live-streamed on the SNIAvideo channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/SNIAVideo.

SNIA Storage Developer Conference-The Knowledge Continues

SNIA’s 18th Storage Developer Conference is officially a success, with 124 general and breakout sessions;  Cloud Interoperability, Kinetiplugfest 5c Storage, and SMB3 plugfests; ten Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions, and amazing networking among 450+ attendees.  Sessions on NVMe over Fabrics won the title of most attended, but Persistent Memory, Object Storage, and Performance were right behind.  Many thanks to SDC 2016 Sponsors, who engaged attendees in exciting technology discussions.

For those not familiar with SDC, this technical industry event is designed for a variety of storage technologists at various levels from developers to architects to product managers and more.  And, true to SNIA’s commitment to educating the industry on current and future disruptive technologies, SDC content is now available to all – whether you attended or not – for download and viewing.

20160919_120059You’ll want to stream keynotes from Citigroup, Toshiba, DSSD, Los Alamos National Labs, Broadcom, Microsemi, and Intel – they’re available now on demand on SNIA’s YouTube channel, SNIAVideo.

All SDC presentations are now available for download; and over the next few months, you can continue to download SDC podcasts which combine audio and slides. The first podcast from SDC 2016 – on hyperscaler (as well as all 2015 SDC Podcasts) are available here, and more will be available in the coming weeks.

SNIA thanks all its members and colleagues who contributed to make SDC a success! A special thanks goes out to the SNIA Technical Council, a select group of acknowledged industry experts who work to guide SNIA technical efforts. In addition to driving the agenda and content for SDC, the Technical Council oversees and manages SNIA Technical Work Groups, reviews architectures submitted by Work Groups, and is the SNIA’s technical liaison to standards organizations. Learn more about these visionary leaders at http://www.snia.org/about/organization/tech_council.

And finally, don’t forget to mark your calendars now for SDC 2017 – September 11-14, 2017, again at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. Watch for the Call for Presentations to open in February 2017.

Flash Memory Summit Highlights SNIA Innovations in Persistent Memory & Flash

SNIA and the Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) invite you to join them at Flash Memory Summit 2016, August 8-11 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. SNIA members and colleagues receive $100 off any conference package using the code “SNIA16” by August 4 when registering for Flash Memory Summit at fms boothhttp://www.flashmemorysummit.com

On Monday, August 8, from 1:00pm – 5:00pm, a SNIA Education Afternoon will be open to the public in SCCC Room 203/204, where attendees can learn about multiple storage-related topics with five SNIA Tutorials on flash storage, combined service infrastructures, VDBench, stored-data encryption, and Non-Volatile DIMM (NVDIMM) integration from SNIA member speakers.

Following the Education Afternoon, the SSSI will host a reception and networking event in SCCC Room 203/204 from 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm with SSSI leadership providing perspectives on the persistent memory and SSD markets, SSD performance, NVDIMM, SSD data recovery/erase, and interface technology. Attendees will also be entered into a drawing to win solid state drives.

SNIA and SSSI members will also be featured during the conference in the following sessions:

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  • Persistent Memory (Preconference Session C)
    NVDIMM presentation by Arthur Sainio, SNIA NVDIMM SIG Co-Chair (SMART Modular)
    Monday, August 8, 8:30am- 12:00 noon 
  • Data Recovery of SSDs (Session 102-A)
    SIG activity discussion by Scott Holewinski, SSSI Data Recovery/Erase SIG Chair (Gillware)
    Tuesday, August 9, 9:45 am – 10:50 am
  • Persistent Memory – Beyond Flash sponsored by the SNIA SSSI (Forum R-21) Chairperson: Jim Pappas, SNIA Board of Directors Vice-Chair/SSSI Co-Chair (Intel); papers presented by SNIA members Rob Peglar (Symbolic IO), Rob Davis (Mellanox), Ken Gibson (Intel), Doug Voigt (HP), Neal Christensen (Microsoft) Wednesday, August 10, 8:30 am – 11:00 am
  • NVDIMM Panel, organized by the SNIA NVDIMM SIG (Session 301-B) Chairperson: Jeff Chang SNIA NVDIMM SIG Co-Chair (AgigA Tech); papers presented by SNIA members Alex Fuqa (HP), Neal Christensen (Microsoft) Thursday, August 11, 8:30am – 9:45am

Finally, don’t miss the SNIA SSSI in Expo booth #820 in Hall B and in the Solutions Showcase in Hall C on the FMS Exhibit Floor. Attendees can review a series of updated performance statistics on NVDIMM and SSD, see live NVDIMM demonstrations, access SSD data recovery/erase education, and preview a new white paper discussing erasure with regard to SSDs. SNIA representatives will also be present to discuss other SNIA programs such as certification, conformance testing, membership, and conferences.

Architectural Principles for Networked Solid State Storage Access

There are many permutations of technologies, interconnects and application level approaches in play with solid state storage today.  In fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to reason clearly about which problems are best solved by various permutations of these. That’s why the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum, together with the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative, is hosting a live Webcast, “Architectural Principles for Networked Solid State Storage Access,” on June 2nd at 10:00 a.m. PT.

As our presenter, we are fortunate to have Doug Voigt, chair of the SNIA NVM Programming Technical Working Group and a member of the SNIA Technical Council. Doug will outline key architectural principals that may allow us to think about the application of networked solid state technologies more systematically, answering questions such as:

  • How do applications see IO and memory access differently?
  • What is the difference between a memory and an SSD technology?
  • How do application and technology views permute?
  • How do memory and network interconnects change the equation?
  • What are persistence domains and why are they important?

I hope you’ll register today and join us on June 2nd for an hour that is sure to be insightful.

SNIA’s Persistent Memory Education To Be Featured at Open Server Summit 2016

sssi boothIf you are in Silicon Valley or the Bay Area this week, SNIA welcomes you to join them and the Solid State Storage Initiative April 13-14 at the Santa Clara Convention Center for Open Server Summit 2016, the industry’s premier event that focuses on the design of next- generation servers with topics on data center efficiency, SSDs, core OS, cloud server design, the future of open server and open storage, and other efforts toward combining industry-standard hardware with open-source software.

The SNIA NVDIMM Special Interest Group is featured at OSS 2016, and will host a panel Thursday April 14 on NVDIMM technology, moderated by Bill Gervasi of JEDEC and featuring SIG members Diablo Technology, Netlist, and SMART Modular. The panel will highlight the latest activities in the three “flavors” of NVDIMM , and offer a perspective on the future of persistent memory in systems. Also, SNIA board member Rob Peglar of Micron Technology will deliver a keynote on April 14, discussing how new persistent memory directions create new approaches for system architects and enable entirely new applications involving enormous data sets and real-time analysis.

SSSI will also be in booth 403 featuring demonstrations by the NVDIMM SIG, discussions on SSD data recovery and erase, and updates on solid state storage performance testing.  SNIA members and colleagues can register for $100 off using the code SNIA at http://www.openserversummit.com.

SNIA NVM Summit Delivers the Persistent Memory Knowledge You Need

by Marty Foltyn

The discussion, use, and application of Non-volatile Memory (NVM) has come a long way from the first SNIA NVM Summit in 2013.  The significant improvements in persistent memory, with enormous capacity, memory-like speed and non-volatility, will make the long-awaited promise of the convergence storage and memory a reality. In this 4th annual NVM Summit, we will see how Storage and Memory have now converged, and learn that we are now faced with developing the needed ecosystem.  Register and join colleagues on Wednesday, January 20, 2016 in San Jose, CA to learn more, or follow http://www.snia.org/nvmsummit to review presentations post- event.

The Summit day begins with Rick Coulson, Senior Fellow, Intel, discussing the most recent developments in persistent memory with a presentation on All the Ways 3D XPoint Impacts Systems Architecture.

Ethan Miller, Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz, will discuss Rethinking Benchmarks for Non-Volatile Memory Storage Systems. He will describe the challenges for benchmarks posed by the transition to NVM, and propose potential solutions to these challenges.

Ken Gibson, NVM SW Architecture, Intel will present Memory is the New Storage: How Next Generation NVM DIMMs will Enable New Solutions That Use Memory as the High-Performance Storage Tier . This talk reviews some of the decades-old assumptions that change for suppliers of storage and data services as solutions move to memory as the new storage

Jim Handy, General Director, Objective Analysis, and Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates will discuss Future Memories and Today’s Opportunities, exploring the role of NVM in today’s and future applications. They will give some market analysis and projections for the various NVM technologies in use today.

Matt Bryson, SVP-Research, ABR, will lead a panel on NVM Futures-Emerging Embedded Memory Technologies, exploring the current status and future opportunities for NVM technologies and in particular both embedded and standalone MRAM technologies and associated applications.

Edward Sharp, Chief, Strategy and Technology, PMC-Sierra, will present Changes Coming to Architecture with NVM. Although the IT industry has made tremendous progress innovating up and down the computing stack to enable, and take advantage of, non-volatile memory, is it sufficient, and where are the weakest links to fully unlock the potential of NVM.

Don Jeanette, VP and John Chen, VP of Trendfocus will review the Solid State Storage Market, discuss what is happening in various segments, and why, as it relates to PCIe.

Dejan Vucinc, HGST San Jose Research Center will discuss Latency in Context: Finding Room for NVMs in the Existing Software Ecosystem. HGST Research has been working diligently to find out where is there room in the existing hardware/software ecosystem for emerging NVM technology when viewed as block storage rather than main memory. Vucinc will show an update on previously published results using prototype PCI Express-attached PCM SSDs and our custom device protocol, DC Express, as well as measurements of its latency and performance through a proper device driver using several different kinds of Linux kernel block layer architecture.

Arthur Sainio, Director Marketing, SMART Modular and Co-Chair, SNIA NVDIMM SIG, will lead a panel on NVDIMM. discussing how new media types are joining NAND Flash, and enhanced controllers and networking are being developed to unlock the latency and throughput advantages of NVDIMM.

Neal Christiansen, Principal Development Lead, Microsoft, Microsoft will discuss Storage Class Memory Support in the Windows OS. Storage Class Memories (SCM) have been the topic of R&D for the last few years and with the promise of near term product delivery, the question is how will Windows be enabled for such SCM products and how can applications take advantage of these capabilities.

Jeff Moyer, Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat will give an overview of the current state of Persistent Memory Support in the Linux Kernel.

Cristian Diaconu, Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft will present Microsoft SQL Hekaton – Towards Large Scale Use of PM for In-memory Databases, using the example of Hekaton (Sql Server in-memory database engine) to break down the opportunity areas for non-volatile memory in the database space.

Tom Talpey, Architect File Server Team, Microsoft, will discuss Microsoft Going Remote at Low Latency: A Future Networked NVM Ecosystem. As new ultra-low latency storage such as Persistent Memory and NVM is deployed, it becomes necessary to provide remote access – for replication, availability and resiliency to errors.

Kevin Deierling, VP Marketing, Mellanox will discuss the role of the network in developing Persistent Memory over Fabrics, and what are the key goals and key fabric features requirements.