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Intel Unveils One-Petabyte Storage Servers For Data Centers (theinquirer.net)
Slashdot reader #9,219 Guy Smiley shared this report on a new breed of high-density flash storage. The Inquirer reports:
Intel has unveiled a brand new form factor for solid state disc drives (SSDs)... Intel Optane's new "ruler" format will allow up to a petabyte of storage on a single 1U server rack... By using 3D-NAND, the ruler crams in even more data and will provide more stability with less chance of catastrophic failure with data loss. The company has promised that the Ruler will have more bandwidth, input/output operations per second and lower latency than SAS... As part of the announcement, Intel also announced a range of "hard drive replacement" SSDs -- the S4500 and S4600 0 which are said to have the highest density 32-layer 3D NAND on the market, and are specifically aimed at data centres that want to move to solid state simply and if necessary, in stages.
will they use SAS/SATA or pci-e or some intel only thing??
But I may need to get an AMD EPYC system to get the PCI-e lanes to make the most of it unless you can get 4 cpus into an 1U box.
At 50 cents per gig, the flash is worth about $500,000 for this PB. Spinning platters are under 5 cents per gig. $50,000 for this PB.
For most datacenter storage purposes, the spinning platters are not a bottleneck. The new product is cool and will be very useful in a few specific applications, but it is not going to change much for datacenters. The flash SSD will also save power as well as space, but not enough to justify 10x the upfront cost. Maybe next generation.
For me, I have had a usb drive plugged into a small atom box I used as a mail server/web server/ftp server. It ran literally for years as the /home mount which serviced some log files, the ftp and www files. I've since moved the servers, but the little box keeps on humming. So I'm not claiming reliable or unreliable, just YMMV!
Yeah, what exactly does 'layer' mean here? Are they trying to say 5 voltage levels, that would give 32 variables? Or do they actually mean 32 levels, which would be hairy to maintain? Somehow, I've never had much confidence in multi-level cell flash, where one needs more than 2 voltage levels to increase the 'bits/cell' and thereby the density. Spansion had an interesting idea in ORNAND, where they had reversible source-drains to store 2 bits in a cell, but from what I recall, that had performance issues due to lack of a real ground.
So how has the reliability story been on this, when compared to the first SSDs that we saw enter the market?
It would make sense only if Intel has problems filling fab capacity, but I fail to see that happening. If they (re-)enter that market, they'll drive down the market prices of flash, making it a loss for everyone! They were in both the NOR flash business as well as the NAND flash business years ago as Numonyx, which they then sold to Micron, and then they formed a partnership w/ Micron on this.
If they do that, I'd conclude that things are really bad at Intel
AC here due to NDA, I am long time Data Center fellow (15+ years,) I do hardware engineering for the Data Center space for a big company you all hate and love. One of my biggest projects was designing a cabinet that had the highest storage capacity in the world.
One thing I can speak for is SSDs. They are reliable, but they do have issues. Often times when you think an SSD has died it hasn't really died, usually it is due to a firmware bug. Last year I was going through a thousand SSD's from three manufactures that had been determined had failed by software or hardware troubleshooting by techs. In 60% of the failures, we were able to recover them back to regular use, the end causes being two fold, a firmware glitch that could be corrected, the other problem being the SMART data was not being read properly or improperly reported by the SSD.
We were able to implement a software solution that detected the problems that were found in the investigation and provide corrective action. This resulted in a huge drop in failures. Further interface with manufacturers has caused them to correct the various issues, which eventually rolls out to other enterprises.
It means 32 layers of cells in the chip, which themselves are probably TLC. 3D-NAND/VNAND are not new, and there's products with up to 64 layers in the market.
High-end SSDs these days, including anything deserving of the description "enterprise grade", have supercapacitors for the specific purpose of allowing writes to complete in the event of power loss.
USB drives generally don't have something like that. I'm sure some might, but most don't.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
It means layers of transistors on each chip.
Traditionally, silicon ICs consist of a single layer of transistors, with several layers of metal wire interconnects placed on top. In other words, the transistors are arranged in a 2D array over the surface of the die.
The major breakthrough in flash memory a few years ago, was the development of "stacked transistors". In other words, multiple independent transistors could be stacked one on top of the other. This now typically goes by the name "3D", with current products now being 32 or 64 layers stacked. The net result is that larger lithography can be used for the individual flash memory cells (leakage due to quantum tunnelling becomes unacceptable once flash cells become too small) improving SNR/endurance, while simultaneously increasing areal density.