Although modern non-volatile memory technologies have made significant advances and their performance is quite high, DRAM is still faster. In some scenarios, such speeds are required, even despite all the limitations inherent in such devices. The ATTO company plans to release a new generation of DRAM-based devices, and we are talking specifically about block network storage systems.
Where it comes to maximum throughput, minimum latency and wear resistance, DRAM is hard to beat. Even before the widespread adoption of flash memory, a technology such as RAM disk was used: either part of the RAM in the system was configured as a disk, or the system was supplemented with cards with DRAM memory, which functioned in a similar way. Such devices are called, for example, NVRAM-accelerators and carry 8-16 GB of DRAM on board, as well as some amount of flash memory for backup.
ATTO believes that this technology is still in demand today, despite all the success of Optane and STT-MRAM. In this case, we are talking about block access, and not about expanding the RAM pool, as Intel implemented in Optane DCPMM modules. The new ATTO SiliconDisk drives, according to the developers, will be indispensable where latency no more than 100 nanoseconds is required.
The ATTO development has a large capacity and high speed of work thanks to its own developed ASIC with “engines” for working with memory, integrated network controllers, general-purpose Arm cores, as well as a system for backing up data to SSD in case of power failures. Think of SiliconDisk as a caching, shared storage layer for AI and machine learning tasks, database indexes, multimedia content, and more.
The company claims 6,4 million IOPS on random 4K operations and linear speeds in the region of 35 GB / s with latencies not exceeding 0,6 microseconds. The device will be block-based and from the point of view of the system it will look like a regular drive, however, in terms of speed, it will take an intermediate place between RAM and external NVMe storages.
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