The Future of Storage and Memory with Intel Optane

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.