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WekaIO trims sales force

By
Chris Mellor
-

WekaIO, the fast parallel file system storage startup, has laid off some of its sales team. We don’t have exact numbers but contacts in two tech storage vendors that declined to be named told us that recently-departed WekaIO execs had applied for sales positions at their companies.

WekaIO CEO Liran Zvibel said: “This is a B.S. spin from our competitors.”

WekaIO CEO Liran Zvibel

“We did have a re-alignment of our sales force as part of our 2020 fiscal year to be highly channel focused in three key vertical markets – machine learning, life sciences and finance.”

He explained: “We have right-sized a small number of teams that could not find a good market fit in their region, keeping teams throughout the USA and Europe. That said, we are proactively hiring new salespeople and we are expanding our teams in the regions that had great success.”

“In your backyard, we have recently hired a Support organisation to handle Europe, augmenting the competent London Sales office we already had.”

Background

WekaIO is a high-flying and fast-growing startup has won numerous benchmarks for its super-fast storage software (here, here and here, for example).

WekaIO was founded in Israel in 2013 and has taken in $66.7m in funding, including a $31.7m C-round last year. Trade investors include HPE, Nvidia, Seagate, Western Digital Capital, Mellanox and Qualcomm.

The recent funding suggests that cash burn is unlikely to be an immediate problem. Zvibel confirmed this: “For the record, we are also very well funded into 2021.”

WekaIO sells 100 per cent through its channel and its own sales reps support the channel. OEMs include Dell EMC, HPE, Penguin Computing and Supermicro. There are more than 65 global resellers, mostly based in the USA. The company launched its WekaIO Innovation Network global partner program in November last year to strengthen channel sales.

Your occasional enterprise storage digest, featuring Pavilion Data, HPE, Supermicro and more

By
Chris Mellor
-

This week’s enterprise storage round-up starts with NVMe-over-Fabric startup Pavilion Data is readying a big sales and marketing push, spending August 2019 VC money. And there are other items such as a big damages win for HPE. Read on.

Pavilion Data revs go-to-market activities

Pavilion Data Systems, an NVMe-over-Fabrics array startup, has hired Mike Canavan as chief revenue officer and Amy Love as chief marketing officer.

Start-ups like Pavilion and Excelero have to work extra hard to make progress, as all the major tech storage suppliers have their own NVMe arrays. Pavilion took in $25m in C round funding in August 2019 to help it do this.

Canavan said he is “looking forward to bringing additional sales leaders on board as we leverage our collective expertise and relationships to grow our footprint and increase NVMe-oF adoption in enterprises around the world.”

We note Dan Heydenfeldt left his Pavilion VP Global Sales position in December 2018.  Asked what has happened with sales leadership since then, a Pavilion spokesperson said: “Gurpreet Singh, the CEO, took over sales responsibility during that time in order to drive alignment with customers and the Pavilion product offering. The strategy worked well. Pavilion now has solid customer traction with Pavilion products in production, which enabled Gurpreet to go after hiring Mike Canavan, rather than an interim step of a VP of Sales.”

Canavan was previously global VP of sales for Flashblade at Pure Storage. and Amy Love was VP, Corporate Market at TriNet and before that, CMO at Violin Memory.

Shorts

HPE has won $439m in damages from Taiwan-based Quanta as a US federal judge tripled damages awarded when a jury found Quanta had conspired with Hitachi-LG, Sony and Panasonic to keep optical disk prices high. Hitachi-LG, Sony and Panasonic settled with HPE years ago. Quanta elected to go to trial – and lost. Case details: Hewlett-Packard Co. v Quanta Storage, 4:18 762, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas (Houston).

Supermicro is relisting on Nasdaq. The company was delisted in August 2018 due to financial reporting irregularaties.  It has taken almost 18 months to arrive at the correct revenue numbers for fiscal 2017, 2018 and subsequent years.

CEO Charles Liang said: “This marks our successful comeback and is the culmination of our efforts to become current with our SEC filings. We are pleased to begin a new chapter for Supermicro that is based on improved internal controls and a dedication to profitable growth. Not only are we back, but we are stronger, better, and re-energised to capitalise on the opportunities ahead.”

Hybrid cloud data warehouser Yellowbrick Data has appointed Jeff Spicer as the company’s Chief Marketing Officer. His career includes stints at Green Dot Corporation, IBM Analytics, VMware and Oracle.

Yellowbrick wants to expand its markets, increase brand awareness and accelerate the adoption of its modern data warehouse offerings, against a background of strong competition from Snowflake and others.

Acronis has become Liverpool Football Club’s Official Global Cyber Backup and Storage Partner.

DataStax has introduced DataStax Luna to provide enterprise-class support for open source Cassandra projects. It claims says Cassandra is the most viable distributed NoSQL database for enterprise applications for a multi-cloud future. Enterprises like like Netflix, Uber, Spotify and others use the open source version of Cassandra because it’s one of the fastest, most powerful NoSQL distributed databases there is. But support was minimal, and enterprise-class support was unavailable outside of forums and distributed groups. 

As is its usual practise when a new year starts, deduplication backup to disk appliance supplier Exagrid has announced record results without talking revenue numbers. It previously reported 12.2 per cent growth in 2016, 14.5 our cent in 2017, and 20 per cent in 2018. Exagrid CEO Bill Andrews said: “We added over 100 new customers with a record number of new customer six-figure purchase orders. We achieved double-digit growth over the same quarter a year ago.” 

VP Products Josh Goldenhar has left Excelero and joined Lightbits Labs as VP Product Marketing. There he will push Lightbits NVMe/TCP technology which directly competes with Excelero’s tech. Eyal Traitel, VP Product Management left in October last year to join Cybellum.

The ObjectiveFS 6.6 release includes memory and performance improvements, such as a new memory caching algorithm for faster cache operations, new heuristic for memory cache, reduced memory usage for active directories, etc.

Smart Modular Technologies has introduced its ME1 and ME2 Series SATA SSDs with NVMSentry firmware. They come in in M.2 2280 and 2.5-inch SSD form factors with  240 GB to 1920 GB capacities. The drives are built from 3D NAND Flash technology with enterprise-class SSD controller features such as end-to-end data path protection, internal SRAM and external DRAM cache ECC (error correcting code) and a firmware code recovery mechanism. 

Block storage supplier StorPool has launched v19 of its eponymous product with multi-cluster support. Also one storage system can provide shared storage to multiple IT stacks – Windows, VMware, Kubernetes (K8S), bare metal, and more. The StorPool iSCSI target now supports Layer 3 routed datacenter networks (next to the existing Layer 3 support. There are performance improvements with latency below 0.1 ms for committed, 3x synchronous replicated systems.

Google launches instant access Cloud Archive

By
Chris Mellor
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Google has delivered on its intent, revealed last April, to deliver an AWS Glacier-like Cloud Archive storage service.

This is pitched as a tape replacement, holding data that is kept for a minimum of one year without access. There is no delay on data retrieval, unlike direct rival AWS Glacier Deep Archive (GDA), which quotes up to 48 hours.

Comparing costs between AWS Glacier Deep Archive and Google’s Cloud Archive will require a lot of work. You will need to define an archive workload, including the various types of operations on the data within it, and run a calculation process. There are worked out examples on Google’s website. No doubt AWS and Google sales resources will be happy to help here.

Geoffrey Noer, Google’s cloud storage product manager, blogs: “At Google Cloud, we think that you should have a range of straightforward storage options that allow you to more securely and reliably access your data when and where you need it, without performance bottlenecks or delays to your users.”  

Google cloud storage options

Archive storage prices

AWS’s GDA costs $0.0099 per GB per month whereas Google’s Cloud archive is more expensive at $0.0012/GiB per month. (A GiB by the way is a Gibibyte; 1GiB is 2 to the power 30 bytes; 1,024MiB, whereas 1GB is 10 to the power 30; 1,000MB.)

Google’s Cloud Archive retrieves data in less than a second, the same as Google’s Nearline and Coldline storage.

AWS and Google charge for data retrieval but on a different basis. Amazon has a three-tier price scheme based on retrieval time; standard ($0.02/GB) is within one hour, expedited ($0.03/GB) is within 5 minutes and bulk ($0.0025/GB) is within 48 hours.

Google Cloud Archive tiers retrieval, known as egress, based on the data amount. Zero to 1TiB/month costs $0.12 (egress worldwide bar China) or $0.23 (China). One to 10TiB costs $0.11 or $0.022/TiB (China again) and more than 10TiB costs $0.08 or $0.20/TiB for China.

Additional charges

Network usage when reading data in the archive within the same region carries no cost. But network usage on access between regions in a continent is $0.01/GiB. General egress charges apply on read access between continents.

There are also operation costs, set in three tiers. Data retrieval costs $0.01/GiB (Nearline), $0.02/GiB (Coldline) and $0.05/GiB (Archive). Class B operations cost $0.01, $.05 and $0.50 per 10,000 for Nearline, Coldline and Archive respectively. Class A operations cost $0.10, $0.10 and $0.50 per 10,000 operations for the three storage classes.

Google has defined Class A and B operations in a table.

Certain operations are free:

  • JSON API storage.channels.stop
  • JSON API storage.buckets.delete
  • JSON API storage.objects.delete
  • JSON API storage.projects.hmacKeys.delete.
  • DELETE with XML API
  • Delete with Object Lifecycle Management


Insight Partners buys Veeam for $5bn

By
Chris Mellor
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Private Equity firm Insight Partners is acquiring the data protection powerhouse Veeam Software for about $5bn.

Veeam, founded and owned by Russians based in Switzerland, will now become a US company, and eligible to bid for US Government contacts. It will have US-based executives, with William Largent, currently EVP for Operations, promoted to CEO, taking over from co-founder Andrei Baranov.

Largent said in a press statement today: “Veeam has enjoyed rapid global growth over the last decade and we see tremendous opportunity for future growth, particularly in the U.S. market. With the acquisition, we are excited that our current U.S. workforce of more than 1,200 will be expanded and strengthened to acquire and support more customers… we believe this acquisition will allow us to scale our team and technology at an unrivalled pace.”

Veeam has achieved a $1bn annual run rate and claims more than 365,000 customers worldwide. These include 81 per cent of the Fortune 500. The company says it is the leader by units and revenue in the software data protection market.

Mike Triplett, Insight Partners managing director and Veeam board member, said: “Veeam’s strong growth, coupled with high customer retention, unparalleled data management solutions and the opportunities to expand services into new markets, make Veeam one of the most exciting software companies in the world today.”

He would say that, though, having just invested big bucks in the company for a second time. Insight Partners invested $500m in Veeam in January 2019.

The Veeam acquisition is expected to close by the end of March this year.

Co-Founders Andrei Baronov and Ratmir Timashev will step down from the Board. Timashev is currently EVP worldwide Sales and Marketing and here is no information on how that role will change. Blocks & Files expects him to step down in due course.

Veeam background

Veeam co-founders Andrei Baranov (left) and Ratmir Timashev (right).

Baranov and Timashev founded Veeam in 2006 and took in no outside funding until the Insight $500m injection in January 2019. They have had an amazing run of growth, capitalising on the VMware-led server virtualization boom. 

Reading between the lines of the acquisition announcement there is an indication that US sales are lower than anticipated, and that this can now change, driving Veeam revenues further upwards.

Veeam bought US firm N2WS in 2018 a year ago for its cloud-native enterprise backup and disaster recovery for Amazon Web Services. However N2WS was divested in August 2019 because it was unable to bid for US federal contracts.

Intel adds PCIe 4.0 support to Optane SSDs

By
Chris Mellor
-

Intel is adding PCIe 4.0 support to its gen 2 Optane SSDs.

This was revealed in a tweet by Frank Ober, a data centre solutions architect at Intel, and first reported by Storage Newsletter.

Optane is Intel’s 3D XPoint storage-class or persistent memory. It is bit-addressable, like DRAM, near DRAM in speed, and more expensive than slower, block-addressable NAND.

Current Intel Optane SSD 905p and M15 products have a PCIe v3.0 interface and use first generation Optane, Intel’s 3D XPoint memory media. Intel announced second generation Optane technology in September last year. This new version is some 50 per cent faster than gen 1.

The PCIe 4.0 interface specifies a 16Gbit/s data link speed with up to 16 links or lanes, delivering 64GB/sec, double PCIe gen 3’s 32GB/sec maximum.

Combining gen 2 Optane with PCIe 4.0 will increase data access speed nicely. It should enable Optane SSDs to at match and probably exceed the speed of Gigabyte’s PCIe 4 Aorus SSD ,which streams data at up to 5GB/sec.

Intel’s gen 1 Optane M15 gumstick drive tops out at  just 2GB/sec. A gen 2 Optane M15 with PCIe 4.0 support may well beat the Gigabyte drive.

Commvault tackles endemic under-performance with sales exec refresh

By
Chris Mellor
-

Commvault has appointed APJ and EMEA territory heads, as chief revenue officer Ricardo Di Blasio puts his own hires in the top sales spots. The enterprise data protection vendor wants to put an end to endemic sales under-performance.

The new recruits are Callum Eade, VP Asia Pacific Japan, who joins from VMware where he was APJ VP, software and defined data centre; and Marco Fanizzi, VP EMEA, previously head of Dell Italy.

Di Blasio said in a canned quote: “The industry’s most successful people are recognising the opportunity ahead of us. We’re focused on the needs of our partners and customers and our objectives are clear – simplify, innovate and execute. This is a new Commvault.”

Callum Eade (left) and Mario Fanizzi

CEO Sanjay Mirchandani, hired from Puppet Labs to replace retiring CEO Bob Hammer in March last year, presided over two disappointing quarters. The most recent quarter ended September 30, 2019 suggests things could be getting better.

Di Blasio joined the firm in May 2019 and his career highlights include global head of sales for VMware Cloud Platform Services at DXC Technology, CEO at Globetouch, COO at Cohesity, and SVP sales and marketing at VMware and EMC.

He wants Commvault’s sales to make a greater impact everywhere in its sales territories, its global accounts, and through its channels. He has initiated a wave of new exec appointments, including Anthony Faustini, VP of global accounts; Mercer Rowe, global head of channels; David Boyle, VP Sales for the Americas; David Wigglesworth, head of Hedvig global sales.

That’s seven new sales heads including Di Blasio. The team now has to deliver.

Sales execution issue history

Commvault has struggled with sales execution for several years. Each attempt to solve the problem has turned into a short-lived Band-Aid needing a fresh fix. Here are some examples of sales issues from the past:

  • Q1 2015 – Commvault reported a depressing set of results as sales headcount and mid-market product and pricing strategy faux pas cause a stumble – another stumble, as first quarter results were poor too
  • Q4 fy2017 – After three quarters of losses, Commvault made a $3.2m profit in its final fiscal 2017 quarter, just enough to tip the full year into profit.
  • Q4 fy2018 – CEO Bob Hammer said: “We know we can and must do more in order to return the company to sustainable, profitable growth.”
  • Q1 Fy2019 – analyst quote: “It is clear that the company continues to have execution/competitive risks.”

Kioxia fab fire update – two week hit to NAND flash production

By
Chris Mellor
-

Yesterday’s fire at Kioxia’s Fab 6 foundry in Japan could cause a two-week halt in production of NAND flash memory at the plant.

The fire broke out in a single machine in a clean room and was extinguished before the Fire Brigade arrived. Overall production in most of the plant is expected to be resumed within two weeks.

Aaron Rakers, a Wells Fargo senior analyst, estimates there will be a “less than a one per cent impact (or 0.8 exabytes) to total global NAND supply in 1Q20 if a two-week resumption is achieved.”

The Chinese language TechNews website reports (thank you, Google Translate) that most of the NAND wafers on the production line can be recovered through a re-work process.

Kioxia operates a joint venture with Western Digital in the flash foundry business.

MinIO earns Cisco validation for Data Intelligence Platform

By
Chris Mellor
-

Cisco has validated Minio as an object store for its scale-out Data Intelligence Platform. Minio joins Cloudian, Scality, Ceph and SwiftStack as approved suppliers.

Cisco launched the Data Intelligence Platform for business analytics, big data and AI workloads in June last year. The system concept includes two storage tiers, a Hadoop data lake layer for hot data and an HDFS/object store for warm data. 

Diagram from Cisco Minio Solution Overview document.

Each of the three elements in the diagram above can scale out independently.

Cisco has published a Solution Overview document describing how Minio fits in as a high-performance object store.

Cisco and MinIO

Cisco states that the MinIO system is fast, with a benchmark result of 12.8GB/sec aggregate read throughput quoted/ The company sais there is “a clear case for the Hadoop stack to operationalize data tiering from the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) to MinIO, offering an attractive alternative for today’s critical workloads. The current design offers a proven deployment model for enterprise Hadoop while enabling a second, highly economical second tier of warm storage.”

For Cisco, the MinIO tier complements the Hadoop tier. That’s the same role played by the Ceph, Cloudian, Scality and SwiftStack object studs when the platform was launched in June. Yet MinIO has demonstrated that its software is faster than Hadoop.

Data Intelligence Platform buyers that use a single MinIO storage tier t could avoid buying the Data Lake/Hadoop part of the system and save a lot of rackspace and money too.

Cisco’s adoption of MinIO marks another validation for the object storage startup which has picked up support from VMware and Nutanix plus a certification from Qumulo.

Hardware scheme

For Cisco the hardware is based around three types of its UCS server. The AI/compute engine box uses UCS C240 M5 (2-socket, 2U, Xeon SP, Optane support, 26 x 2.5-inch drives)  and C480 M5 ML (8 x NVIDIA GPUs, 4U, Xeon SP, Optane support, 24 x 2.5-inch drives) servers. 

The apps running in the compute engine can access a Hadoop data lake tier, again using C240 M5 servers or an object storage tier using S3260 servers. These come in a 4U box holding up to 56 x 3.5-inch drives with dual Xeon SP or E5-2600 v4 controllers.

A hardware picture from a Cisco reference architecture document makes things clearer:

According to Cisco, the Data Intelligence Platform provides:

  • Extremely fast ingestion and engineering of data performed at the data lake
  • An AI computing farm, allowing different types of AI frameworks and computing resources (GPU,
  • CPU, and FPGA) to work on this data for additional analytics processing
  • A storage tier, allowing the gradual retirement of data that has been worked on to a dense storage system with a lower cost per terabyte, reducing TCO.

Kioxia suffers flash fab fire – foundry makes 3-4% of world’s NAND memory

By
Chris Mellor
-

A fire at a Kioxia flash foundry in Japan on January 7 could affect output for the company and Western Digital, Kioxia’s NAND chip partner.

According to a Google translated report in TechNews, a Chinese language website based in Taiwan, “it is believed that this event will have a significant impact on the supply of NAND Flash in the OEM or channel market in the first quarter of 2020, making the price increase trend more clear.”

Even before the fire NAND flash prices were expected to rise 40 per cent in 2020, according to memory chip maker sources polled by Digitimes last week.

In a letter to customers dated Jan 7, 2020, Kioxia said the impact to production was “under review”. The company is investigating the cause of the fire which damaged unspecified manufacturing equipment at Yokkaichi Plant’s Fab 6. The fire has been extinguished and there were no casualties.

Fab 6 makes 64-layer and 96-layer 3D NAND for Kioxia, formerly called Toshiba Memory, and Western Digital and pumps out 3-4 per cent of total world NAND production.

Kioxia letter to customers

In a note to subscribers, Wells Fargo senior analyst Aaron Rakers said the fire took place in a clean room and the facility has been shut down for inspection.

A 13-minute power outage at the entire Yokkaichi foundry last year caused a significant loss of worldwide NAND production capacity.

There’s an update to the Kioxia flash foundry fire here.

Hitachi Vantara targets solution sales with new army of consultants

By
Chris Mellor
-

Hitachi has completed the merger of Hitachi Vantara and Hitachi Consulting, first announced in September.

The company has grand plans for the enlarged Hitachi Vantara, which will focus on digital transformation and vertical solution sales. For example, it cites Lumada Manufacturing Insights, which “integrates silos of manufacturing data and applies AI and machine learning to evaluate and enhance overall equipment effectiveness”.

“A barrage of data and technology is disrupting enterprises and industries the world over,” said Toshiaki Tokunaga, chief executive officer and chairman of the board, Hitachi Vantara. “Through the integration of Hitachi Consulting, the new Hitachi Vantara will be uniquely equipped with the capabilities our customers need to guide them on their digital journeys. We’re going to be the company that helps customers navigate from what’s now to what’s next.”

Hitachi Vantara role and positioning

We can see how Hitachi Vantara’s IT products and consulting services can fit in with these activities, providing IT underpinnings across the group’s business units.

In other words Hitachi Vantara will look to sell its storage products as part of a larger deal, set in a market context relevant to one or more of its business units. Competitors, such as HPE or NetApp, could bid for the storage systems element but would not be able to match the rest of Hitachi’s offering, putting them at a disadvantage. This is Hitachi Vantara’s hope.

Competitors may suggest that as part of a larger business Hitachi Vantara may lose specialist storage technology expertise, putting it at a disadvantage.

Social Innovation Business

In a press release announcing the merger completion, Hitachi said the new Hitachi Vantara will “play a key role in advancing Hitachi’s 2021 Mid-term Management Plan, which aims to make the company a global leader through “Social Innovation Business.”

This strategy is outlined in Hitachi’s 2021 Mid-term Management Plan. This is based on three trends; increasing urbanisation, ageing workforces, and climate change-led  resource shortages. 

Hitachi 2021 Mid-term Management Plan slide. Lumada is the group’s digital transformation Internet of Things brand

Hitachi aims to use its product, IT and operational Ttechnology capabilities across its mobility, smart life, industry, energy and IT business units. Hitachi is focusing them on providing good economic results while meeting, environmental and social values.

The company wants make its products better suited to urban populations. This means providing safe, comfortable and environmentally-friendly railway transportation systems and services. It means designing smart cities to be more convenient and environmentally-friendly. This encompasses smart health therapy kit, city water supplies, energy generation, transmission and management, connected cars and connected home electronic appliances.

Seagate touts Lyve Drive Mobile System for business

By
Chris Mellor
-

Seagate unveiled the Lyve Drive Mobile System series of integrated and modular data storage drives, carriers and receivers for multi-stage workflow processes at CES 2020.

The aim is to capture data as it is generated and then transfer it to data centre facilities. Target applications include the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicle development and video production. Physical data transfer is needed where networking is too slow or costly. 

Jeff Fochtman, Seagate’s marketing VP, issued a quote: “Today’s data management tools are too costly and inefficient for businesses… [Lyve Drive] is Seagate’s first step toward a unified data experience, which will turn data’s possibilities into tangible growth for the world’s most critical industries.”

The range comprises ten products;

Lyve Drive product range.

Lyve Drive Cards – removable CFexpress format flash cards with up to 1TB capacity and an NVMe PCIe 3.0 interface. These are intended for video cameras and other endpoint data generating sources.

Lyve Drive Card Reader – portable reader for the CFexpress cards.

Lyve Drive Cartridge – portable single drive with U.2 interface.

Lyve Drive Cartridge Shipper – for shipping the Cartridge.

Lyve Drive Shuttle – a file copy and transfer device based around a 16TB disk or lower capacity SSD. It has a touchscreen e-ink interface and can be used without a host PC/notebook to capture data. There is also a network interface.

Lyve Drive Shuttle.

Lyve Drive Modular Array – a 4-bay array which can receive up to four disk drives or SSDs and transported in a carrier device.

Lyve Drive Mobile Array – a sealed 6-bay array the same physical size as the Mobile array. A demo version contains six 18TB Exos HAMR drives, which are not yet available.

Lyve Drive Array Shipper – container for shipping Lyve Drive arrays.

Lyve Drive Cartridge and Array Mounts for deploying Cartridges or Arrays in data generating locations.

Lyve Drive Rackmount Receiver – a 4U data ingestion hub which can receive two Lyve Drive arrays so their data can be ingested into data centre processes.

The Lyve Drive brochure does a good job of explaining how Seagate sees the various modular products interacting in use cases like video production.

As yet there is no pricing or availability information for the Lyve Drive products. Blocks & Files expects these products to roll out over the next few months. The publication of a Lyve Drive Shuttle data sheet suggests the range will roll out quite soon.

Micron samples faster DRAM with DDR5 DIMMs

By
Chris Mellor
-

Micron today became the first supplier to sample DDR5 memory modules. They use 1z nm technology and should speed memory access for multi-core CPUs.

DDR5 memory is expected to become the standard memory for most computing devices. Micron claims it will help servers cope with greater workloads by delivering 85 per cent-plus better memory performance than DDR4.

Tom Eby, SVP of the compute and networking business unit at Micron, issued a quote: “The key to enabling these workloads is higher-performance, denser, higher-quality memory. Micron’s sampling of DDR5 RDIMMs represents a significant milestone, bringing the industry one step closer to unlocking the value in next-generation data-centric applications.”

Double data rate

The JEDEC standards authority has specified DDR5 (Double Data Rate 5), the fifth DRAM generation, to have double the bandwidth and capacity of DDR4.

The technology is called double data rate because it transfers two messages per clock tick (MT/sec). Double data rate DRAM that runs at 1066.6MHz can transfer 2133 MT/sec.

Measured this way, DDR4 data rates range from 1600 to 3200 MT/sec. DDR5 increases this to 3200-6400 MT/sec.

At 3200 MT/sec, DDR4 memory provides 134.3 GB/sec effective bandwidth whereas DDR5 3200 will deliver 182.5 GB/sec effective bandwidth. This is a 1.36x speed up. The claimed >1.85x speed increase comes with a 4800 MT/sec rate product, as the chart below shows:

Micron’s one zee

Micron’s 1x memory nodes have 17nm cell sizes; 1y is unspecified but smaller and 1z is smaller again. Its three node shrinks after 1z are known as 1α, 1β and 1γ. The smaller the node the higher the chip density.

Micron sample chips are RDIMM format which are more reliable than ordinary DIMMs because the control signals are buffered in a register.

SK hynix will begin mass-production of its 1Znm DRAM in 2020. ITs 1Z measurement may well be different from that of Micron’s 1z.

Check out a Micron White Paper to dig deeper into its DDR5 DRAM tech.

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