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Memory And Storage

Glenn Berry has a nice post on current and near-future memory and storage technologies:

Over the past couple of years, we have seen the introduction and increasing usage of NVM Express (NVMe) PCIe SSDs based on existing NAND flash technology. These typically have latencies in the 50-100 microsecond range. They also use the newer, much more efficient NVMe protocol and the PCIe interface, giving much better performance than older SAS/SATA SSDs using the old AHCI protocol.

Currently, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is selling 8GB NVDIMM modules for their HPE Proliant DL360 Gen9 servers and HPE Proliant DL380 Gen9 servers. These modules have 8GB of DRAM which is backed by 8GB of flash for $899.00, which is pretty expensive per gigabyte. These two-socket servers have 24 memory slots that each support up to 128GB traditional DDR4 DIMMs. Any slots you use for NVDIMM modules won’t be available for regular memory usage. You can use a maximum of 16 memory slots for NVDIMM usage, which gives you a maximum capacity of 128GB. You must use Intel Xeon E5-2600 v4 series processors in order to get official NVDIMM support. Micron is scheduled to release larger capacity 16GB NVDIMMs in October of 2016.

Read the whole thing.