News

posted on 17 July 2008 08:03

Sun and Samsung have worked together to develop single level cell flash memory for servers that has a 500 percent increase in write cycles. It ought to be capable of being used in storage arrays as well.

The extended life NAND chips will be packaged as solid state drives (SSDs) for servers. Sun is positioning flash memory as a server system software acceleration cache, obviating the need for the software to store and access working data on hard disk drives (HDDs), much slower to access than a flash cache. The extended-life flash, Sun and Samsung say, is expected to deliver the highest endurance ever offered in 24/7 mission-critical computing.

Probable applications for the new extended-life flash include its use in video streaming, high-transaction data processing, search engine operations and other high-speed server functions.

However, unless Sun has an exclusive deal with Samsung, there seems no reason whatsoever why the extended-life SSDs shouldn't also find their way into storage arrays. STEC, the supplier of SSDs to EMC for its Symmetrix arrays, already buys a substantial amount of its NAND flash chips from Samsung.

Michael Cornwell, Sun Microsystems' lead technologist for flash memory, said: "Sun sees incredible upside to using server-grade SLC NAND flash to accelerate customers' applications, and we plan to incorporate this technology into our line of servers and storage. Flash SSDs of this quality and performance when included in our systems and Open Storage products with Solaris ZFS will revolutionize the hardware marketplace. We are excited to be working closely with Samsung to lead this game-changing technology revolution."

Samsung said that its server-grade SLC memory will provide a 100X increase over conventional hard drives, in the number of data transfers (IOPS) per watt, registering a substantial power savings.

Jim Elliott, memory marketing VP at Samsung Semiconductor said: "We have been working with Sun to develop this new 8Gb server-grade SLC flash memory, which will give IT managers the best in high-density, high-endurance memory design with markedly less energy consumption than we see today. 'Endurance up, power down' is going to be the mantra of IT innovators at enterprises everywhere, and server-grade SLC flash is ideally situated to deliver on that equation."

Back story

The back story here is likely to be that Samsung technology as been tuned to suit Sun's need for server-based flash caches. Samsung will surely be knocking on Dell and HP's front doors as both companies are talking about putting flash memory into their servers to accelerate their processing. The SSD controller firmware is likely to have been developed with Sun's needs in mind but the extended life flash cells are just building blocks and ought to be as applicable to storage array SSD applications as they are to server SSD applications.

Sun will probably be hoping that by enhancing its Solaris, ZFS and, probably MySQL, system software to specifically use flash its servers will be faster in operation that Dell and HP servers with unmodified system software; at least unmodified until Linux, other Unix, and Microsoft system software evolves.

There is a possibility that the techniques Samsung has developed to extend SLC flash write endurance could be applied to multi-level cell (MLC) flash as well. That would prove interesting as it would help the much greater adoption of flash. Extending the life of flash as well as increasing its capacity would greatly improve its value proposition.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}