The idea of nonvolatile DIMMs (NVDIMMs) has been around some time, but it's only been in the last couple of years that the new persistent memory category has begun to see some momentum.

Recently, Micron Technology Inc.'s Crucial brand announced the availability of NVDIMM server memory to help protect data in the event of a system power loss. But while that backup capability was identified as one the early uses for NVDIMMs, they are also starting to be used as a way to boost application performance as a tier between fast flash storage and even faster DRAM.

Without NVDIMMs, companies have relied on uninterruptible power supplies, SSDs, mechanical hard drives (HDDs) or other devices to ensure the security of critical data. These approaches, however, mean long backup and restore times due the latency and write times of SSDs and spinning disk, which are a lifetime for today's applications like relational databases, scale-out storage, data analytics and in-memory databases.

Crucial's NVDIMM server memory combines the performance of DRAM and the persistence of NAND onto a single module. In the event of a power loss, the NVDIMM will back up all DRAM data to the NAND while utilizing a backup power source known as an ultracapacitor. When power is restored to the system, the data in the NAND is restored on the DRAM. Servers recognize these NVDIMMs as identical to RDIMMs and they behave the same during normal operation.

Ryan Baxter, a marketing director at Micron, told EE Times in a telephone interview that this is the first NVDIMM Crucial has released following Micron’s November announcement of NVDIMMs. Baxter said this first offering is riding the coattails of HP Enterprise persistent memory news at the end of March, offering a turnkey system with NVDIMMs, and Microsoft, which has added block storage support for NVDIMMs in Windows Server 2016.

“Anybody who wants to buy an NVDIMM capable system can do so without a lot of system integration including bios enablement and hardware integration," Baxter said.

The announcements by HP Enterprise and Microsoft have meant a lot of OEMs are looking to follow suit in creating NVDIMM-ready systems, said Baxter. “It brought other plays out of the woodwork," he said.

But it's not just the benefit of uninterrupted operations that customers are seeing from these systems, he added. Crucial is seeing interesting performance numbers—as high as 300% to 400% improvement as customers are able to leverage NVDIMMs for specific workloads such as database applications.

It's not the entire application that goes into the NVDIMM, said Baxter, only critical “variables" that are moved up from the SSD. Even at a low density, an NVDIMM can provide significant performance improvements over flash without the endurance concerns by moving key parts of an application to reduce bottlenecks, he said. “You're never going to use NVDIMM for mass storage," he added.

By: DocMemory
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