Author: Enrico Signoretti / Source: Gigaom
On the 2nd of April, at their Data Centric Innovation Day, Intel announced a slew of new products, including brand spanking new ones as well as updates to existing product line-ups. There was some news for everybody – whether your specific interests are in datacenter, or edge, or infrastructures.
Among other things, what impressed me the most was the new Optane DC Persistent Memory DIMM, and even more so its implications when coupled with the new (56-core) Intel Xeon Platinium 9200 CPU.Datacenter Optanization!
Up until yesterday, Optane was already considered a great technology, although to some extent it was seen as a niche product. Although more and more vendors are adopting it as an adequate substitute of NVDIMMs as a tier 0 or cache for their storage systems, it was still harder to foresee a broader adoption of the technology. Yes, it is cheaper than RAM and faster than a standard NAND-based device, but that’s about it.
Maybe it was part of Intel’s strategy. In fact, the first generation of Intel Optane products was developed with Micron, and with the first generation of products perhaps they didn’t want to be too aggressive — something which has most likely radically changed after their divorce. The introduction of Optane DC Persistent Memory DIMM actually offers a good idea of the real potential and benefits of this technology and demonstrates how this could change the way infrastructures will be designed in the future, especially for all data-intensive workloads. In practice, in a very simplistic way, Optane DC Persistent Memory DIMMs work in conjunction with standard DDR4 RAM DIMMs. They are bigger (up to 512GB each) and slightly slower than DDR4 DIMMs, but they allow configuration of servers with several TBs of memory at a very low cost. Optane is slower than RAM, but caching techniques and the fact that these DIMMs sit next to the CPU make the solution a good compromise. At the end of the day, you are trading some performance for a huge amount of capacity, avoiding data starvation for the CPU that otherwise should access data on SSD or, even worse, HDDs or network.
How Does It Work?
There are two operation modes for Optane DIMMs, persistent and non-persistent. I know it could sound confusing, but it’s actually very straight forward.
The way the DIMM operates is selected at the beginning of the bootstrap process. When non-persistent mode is selected, the DIMMs look like RAM, and the real RAM is used as a cache. This means that you don’t have to re-write your app, and practically any application can benefit from the increased memory capacity. On the other hand, when Optane DIMMs operate in persistent mode, it is the application that stores data directly in the Optane and manages RAM and Optane as it fits and, as the name suggests, your data is…
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