Intel Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Intel Optane Technology Primer

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Christopher Tobias, General Manager, Optane Software Solutions Division, introduces Intel’s Optane™ technology. Tobias begins with a general overview of memory technology, including DRAM, Intel Optane Technology, and 3D NAND, along a spectrum of cost, capacity, and performance. He then presents the unique properties of Intel Optane technology: It is persistent, allows write in place, is byte addressable, and is low latency. Intel Optane Technology is part of a complete memory and storage hierarchy, from tape and HDD to DRAM, in-package memory, and compute cache, based on the 90/10 locality “rule.”

Personnel: Christopher Tobias

Intel Optane SSD Usages

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Christopher Tobias, General Manager, Optane Software Solutions Division, presents the use case for Intel’s Optane™ technology in SSDs. He begins with a discussion of the Ceph project, to which Intel is a major contributor. Optane SSD for RocksDB/WAL delivers consistently low latency to speed up workloads on Ceph. Next Tobias discusses how Intel Optane SSD technology is able to accelerate analytics performance for the Los Angeles Dodgers organization in a Cisco HyperFlex HCI environment. The final example is a VMware vSAN solution for Cerner, where Intel Optane SSDs improved VM performance by 60% with 33% fewer nodes.

Personnel: Christopher Tobias

Intel Optane Persistent Memory Usages

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Kristie Mann, General Manager, Intel Optane Persistent Memory Division, discusses the use case for Intel’s Optane™ technology as persistent memory. Intel launched the first generation Optane Persistent Memory (PMem) product in 2019 and recently introduced the second-generation 200 series. Optane PMem DIMMs are compatible with DDR but include a protocol to allow asynchronous communication between the media, DRAM, and the processor, as well as a memory controller that allows data to be used directly in any location. Optane PMem can be used as capacity memory (Memory Mode) or as native persistent memory (App Direct Mode).

Since block I/O limits today’s storage system performance, Intel has been developing a new technology known as DAOS which allows Intel Optane persistent memory technology to be used in an advanced storage stack for high-performance computing with advanced storage features. Kelsey Prantis, Software Engineering Manager, and Andrey Kudryavtsev, HPC Storage Architect, then go into detail about DAOS in a discussion with the Storage Field Day delegates. They present record-breaking performance of the solution from IO500 with solutions at TACC and Argonne National Labs.

Personnel: Andrey Kudryavtsev, Kelsey Prantis, Kristie Mann

Intel Optane Technology in the Cloud

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Frank Ober, Principal Engineer, Intel Optane Solutions, presents the use cases for Intel’s Optane™ technology in cloud computing. He presents the case of VKontakte, which leverages Intel Optane SSDs and persistent memory, as well as Intel FPGAs to accelerate their cloud solution and reduce compute cost 40%. The session closes with a summary from Kristie Mann, General Manager, Intel Optane Persistent Memory Division.

Personnel: Frank Ober, Kristie Mann