The launch of Micron Technology's Austin, Tex.-based Micron Storage Solutions Center earlier this year in part was driven by this new mode of collaboration, Steve Moyer, the company's VP of storage software engineering told EE Times in a telephone interview, and the tipping point was the industry beginning to transition non-volatile memory technology and flash emerging as a storage technology. “We really began to look at this seriously as a company two-and-a-half years ago," he said. “There's a shift happening in enterprise storage.

That shift is non-volatile memory technologies moving toward becoming the primary storage media, which means it's important to take a step back to design and tune applications in the storage stack to better work with the way the media works, said Moyer. “Deployment options being to change. It's more than just a fast hard drive."

NVM Express (NVMe), particularly NVMe SSDs are particularly getting a lot of attention as the NVMe ecosystem matures, and the industry really begins to architecture storage systems that better harness the benefits of SSDs, rather than using the same approaches used for spinning disk. “We've been building storage stacks around hard drives for 60 years," said Moyer.

Non-volatile memory acting as a storage has a much bigger software component, he added. “You've got the application stack, the customer's application at the top and the memory at the bottom," as well as things such as firmware and controllers along that stack. “Every part of that has an impact on how customer experiences memory technology."

DRAM remains an important component of the overall solution, Moyer added. “We're going to see the application stack designed around an appropriate amount of DRAM."

Whenever Micron launches a new SSD, it needs to focus on key applications the customer cares about, which means doing a lot of workload analysis, Moyer said, so that it can advise on how best to deploy SSDs depending on the particular workload, such as an Hadoop file system. “The transition in that case, from hard drive to SSDs, isn't just tuning," he said. “We're going to deploy it differently."

Another memory vendor that sees value in working more collaborative with customers is Diablo Technologies. In early June, the company launched its ISV Development and Customer Experience Center in San Jose. Kevin Wagner, Diablo's VP of marketing, said the center with be the company's primary hub for hands-on demonstrations and customer engagement activities. It also houses servers from Diablo's OEMs, providing a collaborative, high-tech environment for software development, applications engineering and technical support.

Wagner's career path includes working for server and CPU vendors, and has experience building ISV relationships. That experience includes the days of AMD moving to 64 bit and Intel launching Itanium. “It was a massive amount of work and effort." For AMD, he ran the driver group to support operating systems including Linux and Solaris. “Just my team alone had more than 140 companies we were working with to port those drivers over."

At the time, the company built an ISV center in Sunnyvale, Calif. with about six racks of servers and more than a dozen desktop computers. “We had a pretty full schedule of ISVs coming in there," he said. Applications engineers would help them install and test their code, tune their code and optimize it.

Today, not all memory and storage technology needs a high level of collaboration to ensure it works within a system, Wagner. SATA SSDs, for example, are now fairly commoditized and have a known storage associated with them. “You may get varying performance from one SSD to another, but you're not architecting a solution around that," he said. “There's a pretty well-known recipe for building that architecture for an application on SATA SSDs."

But it when it comes to new technologies, such as AMD's 64-bit technology, it was important to demonstrate to OEMs why they should move over to that architecture, said Wagner. “When you're in that kind of space, I think something like this is really helpful."

Diablo is now running test scenarios for MySQL, he said, that have a database that's entire in memory by moving flash from the storage tier to the caching tier. Architecting these types of solutions means it makes a lot of sense for the company to have a center where they can collaborate with customers who need to what the best architecture is to leverage Diablo's Memory1 technology, whether their database is Oracle, MongoDB or MySQL. “We really have to build these architectures out and show the customers the best way to use it. It adds a lot of value."

By: DocMemory
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