Author: Marty Foltyn

New Capability in Familiar Places

Marty Foltyn
When it comes to persistent memory, many application developers initially think of change as hard work that likely yields incremental result.  It’s perhaps a better idea to look at the capability that’s new, but that’s already easily accessible using the methods that are in place today.  It’s not that enabling persistent memory is effortless, it’s more that normal code improvement can take advantage of the new features in the standard course of development. The concept of multiple memory tiers is ingrained in nearly every programming model.  While the matrix of possibility can get fairly complex, it’s worth looking at three variables of the memory model.  The first is the access type, either via load/store or block operation. The second is the latency or distance from the processing units; in this case the focus would be on the DIMM.  The last would be memory persistence. Read More

Opportunity for Persistent Memory is Now

Marty Foltyn
It’s very rare that there is a significant change in computer architecture, especially one that is nearly immediately pervasive across the breadth of a market segment.  It’s even more rare when a fundamental change such as this is supported in a way that software developers can quickly adapt to existing software architecture. Most significant transitions require a ground-up rethink to achieve performance or reliability gains, and the cost-benefit analysis generally pushes a transition to the new thing be measured in multiple revisions as opposed to one, big jump. In the last decade the growth of persistent memory has bucked this trend.  The introduction of the solid-state disk made an immediate impact on existing software, especially in the server market.  Any program that relied on multiple, small-data, read/write cycles to disk recognized significant performance increases. In cases such as multi-tiered databases, the software found a, “new tier,” of storage nearly automatically and started partitioning data to it.  In an industry where innovation takes years, improvement took a matter of months to proliferate across new deployments. Read More

Exceptional Agenda – and a Hackathon – Highlight the 2019 SNIA Persistent Memory Summit

Marty Foltyn
SNIA 7th annual Persistent Memory Summit – January 24, 2019 at the Hyatt Santa Clara CA – delivers a far-reaching agenda exploring exciting new topics with experienced speakers:
  • Paul Grun of OpenFabrics Alliance and Cray on the Characteristics of Persistent Memory
  • Stephen Bates of Eideticom, Neal Christiansen of Microsoft, and Eric Kaczmarek of Intel on Enabling Persistent Memory through OS and Interpreted Languages
  • Adam Roberts of Western Digital on the Mission Critical Fundamental Architecture for Numerous In-memory Databases
  • Idan Burstein of Mellanox Technologies on Making Remote Memory Persistent
  • Eden Kim of Calypso Systems on Persistent Memory Performance Benchmarking and Comparison
Read More

Emerging Memory Questions Answered

Marty Foltyn
With a topic like Emerging Memory Poised to Explode, no wonder this SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative webcast generated so much interest!  Our audience had some great questions, and, as promised, our experts Tom Coughlin and Jim Handy provide the answers in this blog. Read on, and join SNIA at the Persistent Memory Summit January 24, 2019 in Santa Clara CA.  Details and complimentary registration are at www.snia.org/pm-summit. Q. Can you mention one or two key applications leading the effort to leverage Persistent Memory? Read More

Remote Persistent Memory: It Takes a Village (or Perhaps a City)

Marty Foltyn
By Paul Grun, Chair, OpenFabrics Alliance and Senior Technologist, Cray, Inc. Remote Persistent Memory, (RPM), is rapidly emerging as an important new technology. But understanding a new technology, and grasping its significance, requires engagement across a wide range of industry organizations, companies, and individuals. It takes a village, as they say. Technologies that are capable of bending the arc of server architecture come along only rarely. It’s sometimes hard to see one coming because it can be tough to discern between a shiny new thing, an insignificant evolution in a minor technology, and a serious contender for the Technical Disrupter of the Year award. Remote Persistent Memory is one such technology, the ultimate impact of which is only now coming into view. Read More

Exceptional Agenda on Tap for 2018 Persistent Memory Summit

Marty Foltyn
Persistent Memory (PM) has made tremendous strides since SNIA’s first Non-Volatile Memory Summit in 2013. With a name change to Persistent Memory Summit in 2017, that event continued the buzz with 350+ attendees and a focus turning to applications. Now in 2018, the agenda for the SNIA Persistent Memory Summit, upcoming January 24 at the Westin San Jose, reflects the integration of PM in a number of organizations. Zvonimir Bandic of Western Digital Corporation will kick off the day exploring the “exabyte challenge” of persistent memory centric architectures and memory fabrics. The fairly new frontier of Persistent Memory over Fabrics (PMoF) returns as a topic with speakers from Open Fabrics Alliance, Cray, Eideticom, and Mellanox. Performance is always evolving, and Micron Technologies, Enmotus, and Calypso Systems will give their perspectives. And the day will dive into futures of media with speakers from Nantero and Spin Transfer Technologies, and a panel led by HPE will review new interfaces and how they relate to PM. Read More

The OpenFabrics Alliance and the Pursuit of Efficient Access to Persistent Memory over Fabrics

Marty Foltyn
  Guest Columnist:  Paul Grun, Advanced Technology Development, Cray, Inc. and Vice-Chair, Open Fabrics Alliance (OFA) Earlier this year, SNIA hosted its one-day Persistent Memory Summit in San Jose; it was my pleasure to be invited to participate by delivering a presentation on behalf of the OpenFabrics Alliance.  Check it out here. The day long Summit program was chock full of deeply technical, detailed information about the state of the art in persistent memory technology coupled with previews of some possible future directions this exciting technology could conceivably take.  The Summit played to a completely packed house, including an auxiliary room equipped with a remote video feed.  Quite the event! But why would the OpenFabrics Alliance (the OFA) be offering a presentation at a Persistent Memory (PM) Summit, you ask?  Fabrics!  Which just happens to be the OFA’s forte. Read More

Around the World, It’s a Persistent Memory Summer

Marty Foltyn
This summer, join SNIA as they evangelize members’ industry activity to advance the convergence of storage and memory. SNIA is participating in the first annual European In-Memory Computing Summit, June 20-21, 2017 at the Movenpick Hotel in Amsterdam.  SNIA Europe Vice-Chair and SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) Co-Chair Alex McDonald of NetApp keynotes a session on SNIA and Persistent Memory, highlighting SNIA work on an NVM programming model and persistent memory solutions available today and SNIA is a sponsor in the exhibit hall. Read More

Your Questions Answered on Non-Volatile DIMMs

Marty Foltyn Leave a comment
  by Arthur Sainio, SNIA NVDIMM SIG Co-Chair, SMART Modular SNIA’s Non-Volatile DIMM (NVDIMM) Special Interest Group (SIG) had a tremendous response to their most recent webcast:  NVDIMM:  Applications are Here!  You can view the webcast on demand. Viewers had many questions during the webcast.  In this blog, the NVDIMM SIG answers those questions and shares the SIG’s knowledge of NVDIMM technology. Have a question?  Send it to nvdimmsigchair@snia.org. 1. What about 3DXpoint, how will this technology impact the market? Read More

How Many IOPS? Users Share Their 2017 Storage Performance Needs

Marty Foltyn Leave a comment
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