Supermicro adorns servers with bright and shiny ULLtraDIMMs Supermicro is using fast flash access ULLtraDIMM technology from SanDisk to enable its Green SuperServer and SuperStorage platforms to access data faster. An ULLtraDIMM is flash memory interfaced to a memory DIMM connected to a computer's main CPU-Memory bus instead of the PCIe bus, which avoids the latter's longer latency …
"So far, despite its promise, only certain IBM X-Servers have been using the technology, and that server business is being sold by IBM to Lenovo. There is are no public signs of interest from other server manufacturers, such as Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu or HP. Thee recruiting of Supermicro will be most welcome to SanDisk."
The sad thing is that when small researchers contact SanDisk to be able to purchase small quantities of the UltraDIMMS, SanDisk doesn't return emails or phone calls.
There's a lot of potential for the chips, but they must have a quality control issue because they don't seem to exist in the real world. I guess one has to be an employee of a big firm to be able to see these rare mythical beasts.
I guess they want to get the hype out before other technology aka RRAMs become real.
Posted Anon for obvious reasons.
"So far, despite its promise, only certain IBM X-Servers have been using the technology, and that server business is being sold by IBM to Lenovo"
The things are insanely expensive(*) and may be limited to Windows.
(*)10-100 times the price of equivalent PCIe devices
As AC write, it's hard to get much information about them. This may change when Supermicro roll things out but drivers are likely to be a serious hurdle in non-windows environments.
"and may be limited to Windows."
Why do people make wild arse negative guesses without doing the tiniest bit of research?
http://www.diablo-technologies.com/faq/
WHAT OPERATING SYSTEMS DOES MCS SUPPORT?
MCS currently supports Windows, Linux, and VMware operating systems
I did do the research - including email exchanges with Sandisk Europe.
The Diablo driver is a proprietary binary blob.
From a number of points of view, that makes it unstable and unreliable until an opensource driver is available.
Ulltradimms also require bios tweaks or the OS won't see them - They can't just be dropped in any old box.
Supermicro were working on this with Sandisk when I spoke to them back in March/April. I'm a little surprised it took this long to get them to market.
"From a number of points of view, that makes it unstable and unreliable until an opensource driver is available."
That is pure bunk.
Some things proprietary will outperform 'open source'.
And if you toss out the argument that you're going to want to tweak it... more pure bollox
That's overstating it. While Linus isn't best pleased with NVidia, their binary drivers tend to work fairly well in practice.
Given that these SSDs are server items they will only have to support a much narrower range of hardware platforms - a handful of server chipsets. The testing workload should be much less than NVidia has to deal with.
These are server components - the market won't stand for instability. Either the vendor will get them right or crash and burn. I suspect that server vendors will want to make it work if they view this as a potentially strategic product. The lack of open-source drivers isn't going to be an issue to anybody but die-hard GPL supporters (apologies to RMS).
"they don't seem to exist in the real world" - information on the IBM eXFlash DIMM is here, they certainly do exist: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips1141.html?Open and also a paper on use: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/REDP5089.html
"The things are insanely expensive(*) and may be limited to Windows." - eh?:
On the IBM Flash DIMM the Supported OS on that site shows: Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft Windows Server 2012, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 (Service Pack 1), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server x64 Edition (Update 5 for the x3850 X6/x3950 X6; Update 4 for the x3650 M4), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 for AMD64/EM64T (Update 3), VMware vSphere 5.5 (Update 1) VMware vSphere 5.1 (Update 2)
Hardly Windows Only.
How about price? Insane? Well this technology is never going to be low cost, however lets look at this (and remembering that these are ESP (list) and no IBM client will ever pay full list price):
00FE000 200GB module has a published list price of £1638
00FE005 400GB module is list price £3000
VS a fusion (IBM Branded Fusion) card: 785GB £8855 or 1.2TB MLC mono adapter £14,265
So 6x 200GB @ £1638 = £9828 vs 1x 1.2TB £14265.
Latency...
Flash DIMM less than 5 microseconds write latency, PCIe adapters typically 10-15microseconds as they sit on the PCI-E bus.
For the right workloads, the incredibly low latency of having the Flash memory sitting right on the memory channel close to processor really does make sense, but one does need to look at:
£/GB
£/IOPS read (with equivalent block sizes)
£/IOPS write (with equivalent block sizes)
max seq read rate etc etc when comparing these kinds of technology
Of course - the next phase of Flash is coming with NVM express, the plug in PCI express disks. Think of this like taking a Fusion card, and making it a hot pluggable drive that connects to the server like existing SAS disks, but of course is direct to PCI bus, not via a SAS interface. If your interested more info here: http://nvmexpress.org/
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