Memory Channel Storage SSDs

will the new concept fly?

should you book a seat yet?

• 1st level of market co-existence:- is high performance server clusters - where PCIe SSDs effectively provide the next level of SAN-like data connectivity and fault tolerance functionality using PCIe fabric technology.
  
  PCIe fabric - sharing data between different physical servers at low latency - is something which PCIe SSDs can do which DRAM memory technology can't (yet).
  
  One way to think about this is - what's the best way for one memory channel storage accelerated server to talk to another? The answer is via a switched PCIe SSD fabric.

• 2nd level of market co-existence - is entry level to mid-range server performance.
  
  For example - in cost sensitive server markets like iSCSI SSDs.
  
  That's because the memory management technology needed to implement a Diablo-style ull SSD will be more expensive to implement than entry level fast-enough PCIe SSDs - which don't need such fast SSD controllers and don't need RAM caches or nvRAM caches - each of which escalates upwards the floor price of the ull SSD.
  
  The cheapest fast-enough PCIe SSDs will always be cheaper than the cheapest memory channel SSDs.

• if Fusion-io was the flash technology partner for Diablo (instead of SMART - and forgetting about the very material facts that FIO doesn't admit publicly to having the same flash technology and also has a very different approach to everyone else when it comes to SSD controller design) what could Fusion-io deliver with a memory channel connected SSD that it can't already deliver with a PCIe SSD?
  
  FIO has demonstrated in market shipping products that shrinking down latency requires more than hardware design.
  
  You need to remove layers of hard drive related junk which is hard coded into many layers of enterprise systems software. But when you do this - sometimes by introducing new side-stepping APIs - you can get apps performance which is 10x faster than raw speedup which you get from simply running legacy software faster on SSDs.
  
  This is something which academic researches at the Non Volatile Systems Lab UCSD have also written about too.
  
  Fusion-io is already well down this learning curve - and if they had the benefits of a lower latency to memory technology - my guess is they would be best placed to further exploit it. Having said that, however, until we know what the Diablo/SMART memory channel controller latency delivers - we can't be sure how it will compare to what FIO already delivers with the worse latency of PCIe but better latency of a flash translation layer in which the apps server is the same CPU that manages the flash.

• if SMART were simply to come to market with a new fast PCIe SSD (instead of a new type of SSD) it would struggle and probably fail to establish a market for such a product. If and when SMART does introduce its own PCIe SSD my guess is it would be a fast-enough product optimized for cost and efficiency rather than speed. But that's another story.
  
  Without a software base - simply having a lower latency PCIe SSD wouldn't get you many customers today.