Diablo Technologies Memory Channel Storage
January 2015 – At the 2015 Storage Visions Conference that preceded CES, we had a chance to review the new Memory Channel Storage (MCS) developed by Diablo Technologies. The product is a NAND Flash memory product that operates in a system through the standard DIMM connections and the memory channel interface. This provides a direct addressable persistent storage/cache capability to the server system.
Memory Channel Storage Architecture
The memory subsystem solution addresses the typical serial bottleneck on addressing storage for the servers, by allowing the CPU to direct access the storage memory in the Flash as you would DRAM. This makes for a deterministic and scalable solution and predictability on throughput optimization. The Flash modules, which are in the market under the SanDisk branding of UlltraDimm and IBM’s branding of ExFlash Dimms, utilize a custom MCS persistence layer to have the memory appear as an RDIMM module. As a result of the interface, the systems need a BIOS that addresses RDIMMs and supports a DDR3 interfaces at this time.
Diablo Technologies xFlash MCS NV DIMM
The use of the Memory Channel interface allows for scaling up to the 200G-400GB range for current technology. In most server systems an 8 memory slot system will typically have 4 slots of DRAM and 4 slots of MCS XFlash DIMMs. And a 16 slot system will have 8 DRAM / 8 NV Memory DIMMs.
These solutions are directly scalable with the new multicore CPUs and also scale with the memory interface which keeps the architecture very low latency with no bottle necks for new processors.
