SanDisk announced that its ULLtraDIMM Solid State Drive (SSD), a memory channel storage solution, is shipping for qualification with select enterprise servers. IBM will be one of the first users.
The addition of flash technology on the DRAM memory channel expands the growing penetration of flash storage technology in enterprise data centers, and complements SanDisk’s existing flash-based server hardware and software storage solutions.
The SanDisk ULLtraDIMM SSD can be integrated into an existing DIMM slot, ensuring ultra-low latency in business applications to improve application response times.
Additional ULLtraDIMM SSDs can also be added to available DIMM slots, scaling performance and capacity without impacting latency. This creates new opportunities for server system designs to support use cases that require extremely fast storage, such as High-Frequency Trading (HFT), VDI, transaction processing, virtualization and cloud computing.
“The SanDisk ULLtraDIMM SSD was designed to expand the reach of ultra-low latency flash storage throughout the data center and scale to meet the requirements of any enterprise application, no matter how bandwidth or capacity intensive,” said John Scaramuzzo, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk.
SanDisk’s ULLtraDIMM SSD will be used by IBM under the eXFlash DIMM brand name.
IBM recently announced that the eXFlash DIMM is an option for its System x3850 and x3950 X6 servers providing up to 12.8TB of flash capacity2. IBM tested the solution under a variety of enterprise workloads and end-user scenarios. These early benchmarks showed that the eXFlash DIMM SSD achieved 5-10 microsecond write latency—the lowest in the industry.
