Diablo Technologies is a company founded in 2003 that have revolutionize the flash market with their Memory Channel Storage (MCS) solution: a very high performance host flash solution that fit in DIMMs connectors instead to be plugged to PCIe or SAS connectors.
An interesting idea, supported by several vendors that make flash more closest to the CPU, but still flash seens as block devices as other SSD.
Now Diablo Technologies is announcing the launch of Memory1™, the first all-flash server system memory technology that rewrites the rules of datacenter performance and economics the the flash roles on host side.
Compared to Carbon1 and other MCS solution, Memory1 is something unique: is a flash not only connected as a RAM DIMM, but that apper as a RAM DIMM!
The revolutionary technology packs four times the capacity of the largest DRAM modules, delivering greater capability on fewer servers and lowering datacenter costs by up to 70 percent. The same system memory slots that now hold 128 or 384 gigabytes of DRAM memory can house up to four terabytes of Memory1 and process data-intensive applications that were previously beyond reach.
Memory1 is deployed into standard DDR4 DIMM slots and is compatible with standard motherboards, servers, operating systems and applications. And it’s transparant to OSes and applications!
Inside a Diablo Flash Memory DIMM there is proprietary chipset that can transfor the NVM flash storage as “standard” RAM.
Considering that lot of application are moving to an “In-Memory” based model, this can make the adoption of those solutions more interesting, considering that a single Diablo DIMM capacity is starting from 64 GB (and there are also 128 and 256GB models).
Considering also that CPU usually (for most workloads) is not the main bottleneck, this can permit a better server sizing to reduce the number of physical servers (Diablo estimate a 1:10 consolidation), but without the need of costly server with lot of DIMMs (usually the 4 sockets models).
The increased capacity (x4 compared to traditional DRAM) is not the only value, there is also a 70% Less Power per GB and a significantly lower cost per GB.
But of course flash is not so fast a DRAM, but to help this there is a specific Diablo technology that optimize the distributions of data across DRAM and flash, making the main memory as a multi-tier memory. This work transparently to the OS, but must know the specific OS in order to optimize in the right way the memory allocation. Main OSes and hypervisors will be supported. Also there will be the need of a correct sizing between DRAM and flashes, in order to optmize in the right way those two different memory tiers.
Diablo will initially focus on delivering Memory1 to cloud and hyperscale datacenters, which stand to see significant economic benefits because of their scale. Memory1 is first shipping to select customers and will be broadly available this fall.