Among other things author - George Crump - says "Crossbar
believes that it can achieve 24 million IOPS on a single 4TB NV-DIMM without the
use of a RAM buffer or a capacitor." ...read
the article
Editor's comments:- when startups enter new
emerging markets they are often tempted to make headline grabbing claims.
And I think the "24 million IOPS" (IOPs as in you
and I think about them) has to be interpreted in that context. (How can you
claim record breaking IOPS when all you've got is a memory IP - and that's just
part of a yet to be integrated technology set which together make IOPs.)
This
is not to decry the importance and validity of the
tides of
change in the SCM SSD DIMM wars market - which have consumed nearly
half of my working hours in the past year.
We saw similar wild
claims when the startup Fusion-io
was trying to get across how
PCIe SSDs would change
the enterprise storage market by reference to the nearest similar technology
when Fusion said in 2007 it would replace SANs. (Because SAN based SSD
accelerators were at that time the SSD market's dueling weapons of choice.)
Going
back to Crossbar - there is a genuine problem for the industry (which I touched
on in an earlier post about Diablo's
DMX software) - which is - what are the most useful metrics to judge tiered
memory systems by?
As we've seen in the
SSD accelerated storage
pool market since 2009 - there's a wide spectrum of use cases and cost
considerations which have many viable business intersections.
We
need new "goodness" numbers for DIMM wars memories.
But I
think using IOPS to characterize a memory product is less useful to describe why
people might want to look at it than wattage, raw capacity in a DIMM,
uncached raw R/W latency and price.
And - most important of all -
what software does it work with? And how well does the software behave?
related articles
"When all storage is made from memories the
dividing line between storage and memory is much more fluid than it has been
before."
where are we
heading with memory intensive systems? "Ever since Diablo's Memory1 had been launched the year before I
had been wondering about the flash controller aspects of this product. I
learned the missing pieces in some conversations I had with the company."
SSD
aspects of Diablo's Memory1 and DMX "big idea #3 - retiring and retiering enterprise DRAM which
includes a new value proposition for enterprise flash SSDs (flash as RAM) and
presages a rebalancing of server memories. DRAM will shrink as a percentage of
the physical RAM - which will also make it easier for emerging alternative
memory types to be adopted by hardware architects and by systems software too."
what
were the big SSD ideas in 2015. "Some of the contenders include:- NVMe over Fabric, NVDIMM-X and
a divergence of views about 3-D NAND."
