Month: March 2017

Intel Pits Optane SSDs Against NAND SSDs

Intel's Optane PyramidOnly a week after announcing its Optane Enterprise SSDs Intel has launched m.2-format Optane SSDs for end users.  It appears that we are at the onset of an Optane surge.

These SSDs communicate over the PCIe bus bringing more of the 3D XPoint’s performance to the user than would a SATA interface.

Pricing is $44 for a 16GB module and $77 for 32GB.  That’s $2.75 and $2.40 (respectively) per gigabyte, or about half the price of DRAM.  Intel says that these products will ship on April 24.

What’s most interesting about Intel’s Optane pitch is that the company appears to be telling the world that SSDs are no longer important with its use of the slogan: “Get the speed, keep the capacity.” This message is designed to directly address the quandary that faces PC buyers when considering an SSD: Do they want an SSD’s speed so much that they are willing to accept either Continue reading “Intel Pits Optane SSDs Against NAND SSDs”

NGD’s 24TB SSD Is Just The First Step

NGD LogoWith the tagline: “Bringing intelligence to storage” start-up NGD Systems, formerly known as NexGen Data, has announced a 24 terabyte SSD that the company claims to be the highest-capacity PCIe/NVMe device available.

The read-optimized Catalina SSD employs a lot of proprietary NGD technology: Variable rate LDPC error correction, unique DSP (digital signal processing) algorithms, and an “Elastic” flash transition layer (FTL), all embodied in an NGD-proprietary controller.  This proprietary technology allows Catalina to offer enterprise performance and reliability while using TLC flash and less DRAM than other designs.

NGD claims that the product is already shipping and is being qualified by major OEMs.

Based on some of the company’s presentations at past years’ Flash Memory Summits the controller has been carefully balanced to optimize cost, throughput, and heat.  This last is a bigger problem than most folks would imagine.  At the 2013 Hot Chips conference a former Violin Memory engineering manager told the audience Continue reading “NGD’s 24TB SSD Is Just The First Step”

Intel Announces Optane SSDs for the Enterprise

Intel-Optane-SSDThis week Intel announced the Optane SSD DC P4800X Series, new enterprise SSDs based on the company’s 3D XPoint memory technology which Intel says is the first new memory technology to be introduced since 1989.  The technology was introduced to fill a price/performance gap that might impede Intel’s sales of high-performance CPUs.

Intel was all aglow with the promise of performance, claiming that the newly-released SSDs offer: “Consistently amazing response time under load.”

Since the early 1990s Intel has realized that it needs for the platform’s performance to keep pace with the ongoing performance increases of its new processors.  A slow platform will limit the performance of any processor, and if customers don’t see any benefit from purchasing a more expensive processor, then Intel will be unable to keep its processor prices high.

Recently NAND flash SSDs have helped Intel to improve the platform’s speed, as did the earlier migration of Continue reading “Intel Announces Optane SSDs for the Enterprise”