Intel Memory and Storage Moment Tech Field Day Presentations

Intel Memory and Storage Moment Review

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Marisa Ahmad of Intel’s Technology Leadership Team reviews Intel’s 2020 Memory and Storage Moment announcements for the Tech Field Day delegate panel. She begins with a review of the six pillars of technology for Intel: Process & Packaging, XPU Architecture, Memory & Storage, Interconnect, Security, and Software. She then discusses the evolution of the memory and storage hierarchy and how Intel’s Optane 3D-XPoint technology fits into it. Finally, she introduces the Tech Field Day presentations that were integrated with the Memory and Storage Moment.

Personnel: Marisa Ahmad

The Future of Storage and Memory with Intel Optane

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Frank Hady, Intel Fellow and Chief Optane Systems Architect, discusses the evolution of the memory and storage hierarchy and the application of Intel Optane technology across it. Intel’s Optane technology can help to fill the “hole” in the memory and storage hierarchy between NAND flash and DRAM in two different ways: Storage-addressed and memory-addressed. As systems evolve beyond Dennard scaling with multi-core and specialized processors, systems need multiple hierarchies of memory and storage with greater resources to support them. Storage-addressed Optane technology can serve as specialized capacity for metadata and logs along with NAND flash, while memory-addressed Optane technology can be a tier of memory along with DRAM as a cache.

Personnel: Frank Hady

Intel Optane Persistent Memory Update

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Kristie Mann, Senior Director, Product Management discusses the application of Intel Optane technology in the Persistent Memory tier. This technology is used in high-end servers such as Oracle Exadata, high-performance computing (HPC) exemplified by Intel’s DAOS, and big memory as with MemVerge software. Oracle Exadata X8M ships with Intel Optane Persistent Memory (PMEM) today and the system has been optimized to use it as a new data tier to accelerate database commits. Intel’s open source Distributed Asynchronous Object Store (DAOS) leverages Intel Optane Persistent Memory technology as a hot data tier for small I/O operations and metadata to deliver an order of magnitude better performance than other object stores. Finally, companies like MemVerge are using Intel Optane Persistent Memory technology to deliver “big memory” to existing applications with in-memory snapshots and persistence.

Next, Kelsey Prantis, Senior Software Engineering Manager, gives details of how the DAOS software uses Intel Optane Persistent Memory to set records for performance. Block I/O limits storage performance in today’s enterprise storage solutions, with misaligned I/O and small I/O lining up to be serialized, reducing performance. DAOS uses Intel Optane Persistent Memory to store these small I/Os, delivering record-setting performance in the ISC20 IO500 competition. Using second-generation Persistent Memory, DAOS is showing a 58% improvement in write bandwidth and 5% more read bandwidth. Prantis and Mann also take questions from the Tech Field Day delegates and discuss the application of this technology.

Personnel: Kelsey Prantis, Kristie Mann

Intel Data Center Optane Storage Products and Updates

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David Tuhy, VP and GM of Intel’s Data Center Optane Storage Division, introduces new data center SSDs leveraging Intel Optane technology for high-performance applications. Growing workload intensity impacts system architecture, and the number of CPU cores per socket has driven up the amount of memory and storage required. Legacy storage is a bottleneck, and Intel is filling this gap with Intel Optane data center SSD products, including the new P5800X, which delivers record-setting performance. When compared to the previous generation P4800X, the P5800X delivers 3x random 4k mixed IOPS, 40% better QoS, 3x more sequential 4k-128k bandwidth, and 67% better endurance. It also includes a special mode that can deliver 4.6 million 512 byte IOPS. Hady then presents the growing ecosystem for Intel Optane technology. Finally, Hady and Intel Senior Director of Product Management Kristie Mann take questions from the Tech Field Day delegates.

Personnel: David Tuhy, Frank Hady, Kristie Mann