A recurring theme of Micron Technology's live corporate updates over the past year or so have been that it's no longer just a memory and chip company, and that it is more focused on providing integrated, custom solutions to its various customer segments.

This week's update from Austin, Texas saw the company continuing this trend of laying out intentions for the future with the announcement of the Micron Storage Solutions Center (MSSC), a new facility in that city focused on software and collaboration, as well as several reference architecture designs and some new enterprise SSDs.

The company unveiled its Micron Accelerated Solutions, a set of purpose-built, scale-out solutions for open-source and software-defined data centers. The first three were designed and developed in close collaboration with enterprise software and hardware companies including VMware, Supermicro and Nexenta. Micron also added to its data center SSD portfolio of existing SATA and SAS drives with the introduction of Micron NVMe 9100 and 7100 PCIe SSDs, the latter of which brings nonvolatile memory as close to the processor as possible.

The MSSC will be focused on three main areas: customer workload optimization, partner solutions and storage software innovation, and is initially housing 65 staff in 11,000 square feet with expansion expected by the end of the summer, Steve Moyer, VP of storage solutions, told EE Times. Activities include engineers working customers to bring applications into the lab to understand the workloads they generate and what demands they place on storage, he said, while moving storage software away from traditional spinning disk modes of thinking to ones that leverage non-volatile memory.

The broader news emphasized by company execs is that Micron wants to be a seen as a storage company, even if it is still driven by memory technologies. President and CEO Mark Durcan said the industry is changing as Moore's Law slows and the company wants to drive business that's more about solving differentiated problems, particularly in the data center.

NAND or DRAM make up as 75% of most servers, Durcan told EE Times, and since 2004, Micron has become more flash-focused, as well as more enterprise focused, by announcing enterprise SSDs optimized for the data center, moving Hybrid Memory Cube forward, developing its Automata processor and its 3D XPoint technology. Durcan said the company is in a relatively unique position as it is one of only four companies that create NAND and one of three that create DRAM.

Moyer sees Micron's shift to focusing on storage and software as a natural extension of the company's core competencies, and said collaboration is key aspect of the new center. Micron Accelerated Solutions reflect that collaborative approach, and focused on combining compute, storage and software.

By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved