Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By
Jing Xie, Chief Operating Officer, Formulus Black
Predictions for 2020 in the Persistent Memory Space
The
POSIX-Compliant Block Device Is The First "Killer App" For Persistent Memory
Persistent
memory technology has the potential to transform and expand the $100 billion
dollar DRAM market due to a combination of its impressive performance
characteristics and persistence capabilities. Industry experts forecast
that Intel's brand of persistent memory alone will become a $1B+ business in
just a few short years. Other storage and memory vendors are expected to
release persistent memory variants in the next few years. One advantage and
current obstacle to broad persistent memory adoption is that it is byte
addressable and provides load/store memory access. The reason this is an
absolute advantage in the long term is that application developers can take
advantage of the granularity afforded by the new type of memory media.
Short term, companies that want to leverage persistent memory may find that
their current OS, hypervisor, database, or ERP vendor does not support
persistent memory.
Despite
not being able to take advantage of byte addressability and load/store
functions, the value of an industry standard block device for persistent memory
is that it enables ANY application to run without application changes.
Most businesses hesitate to modify existing applications and may not have
resources to update their commercial software to an "enterprise" version that
supports persistent memory. Our big bet at Formulus Black, and one that
we believe pays off for us in both the short and long term, is that many
enterprises will NOT rewrite their application to run natively on persistent
memory but rather will move existing applications to run on persistent memory
to get vastly improved performance, especially if zero development time and
risk is required. If Intel and the major OEMs want to drive mass
persistent memory adoption, we believe the best approach is to provide a high
performance, NUMA aware, easy to manage and provision, POSIX-Compliant block
device interface for persistent memory - such as the Formulus Black LEM.
Nice
Knowing You NVMe SSD - Tier 1 Storage Is Now Persistent Memory
In
today's information-driven economy, quickly processing ever-increasing volumes
of data into actionable information to win customers and edge out the
competition have become table stakes. Unfortunately, most estimates for
just how much data actually gets analyzed are dismal at between 1-2% of all
data. Processing data fast is hard, and one of the problems with
traditional storage is that it is simply too slow (ie: high latency, subpar
bandwidth) to keep up with the capabilities of modern multi-core CPUs.
Imagine
if you could store datasets much closer to the CPU such that anytime data needs
to be processed and analyzed, it could be accessed almost immediately.
Earlier in 2019, Intel released their technology called OptaneTM DC Persistent
Memory, enabling just that. NVMe SSDs are still considered "fast" storage
technology but relative to persistent memory, the performance falls quite a bit
short. Putting the performance gap in terms that most data analysts would
understand, it is like waiting 1 minute instead of 1 second for the exact same
database query to complete.
While
OptaneTM DC Persistent Memory Modules are not offered in the same larger
capacities as NVMe SSDs, they do offer higher capacity than DRAM and also
enable data persistency across system reboots and crashes. On a standard
two-socket server, up to 6 terabytes of persistent memory can be
configured. With Facebook, Apple, and the largest enterprises as rare
exceptions, 6 terabytes is sufficient to run the transactional databases of
most mid-sized enterprises. There will always be a market for secondary
and large capacity storage but persistent memory's low latency, high bandwidth,
and magnified IOPs capabilities put it solidly in first place.
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About
the Author
Jing
is a global software executive with extensive knowledge in data, analytics, and
cloud computing. Jing brings with him a wealth of operational, product
strategy, partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, and P&L management
experience.
Prior
to joining Formulus Black, Jing served as a M&A and business development
executive in IBM's Hybrid Cloud and Analytics business. Throughout his
career at IBM, Jing was regularly selected for the most challenging projects
and roles within IBM's analytics, database and data management, worldwide
software, and sales and distribution business units. From 2014-2017, Jing
was instrumental in the execution of several strategic partnerships valued at
over $200 million in profit to IBM. In 2012, he had the opportunity to
work as a technology advisor to the ministry of agriculture in Senegal, Africa
as part of IBM's corporate service corps (an opportunity extended only to the
top performers within the company).