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Micron is announcing their new SolidScale architecture, an integrated storage platform that enables breakthrough low-latency and high performance access to storage and computing.
SolidScale allows users to deploy both next-generation, cloud-native applications as well as legacy applications prevalent in today’s enterprises. Micron’s innovative SolidScale architecture’s extremely high throughput and unprecedented low latency deliver data quickly for usages such as virtual platforms, online transaction processing, machine learning and analytics.
According to Darren Thomas, vice president of Micron’s Storage Business Unit, “We estimate that companies using NVMe SSDs deployed in application servers today are on average using less than 50% of their IOPS and capacity. With the new Micron SolidScale architecture, capacity is shared across application servers, unlocking capacity customers have already paid for so that they can do more with less and unleash flash’s true performance.
At Micron, we consider the impact of every workload, application and environment as we design the technology, products and systems that allow our customers to deploy applications faster and scale without limits.”
Estimates indicate that the total amount of digital data created worldwide will reach over 160 zettabytes per year by 2025. As enterprises move toward a scale-out data center, they would like to be able to achieve more potential out of their data in a flexible architecture that is able to integrate with their increasing storage and compute requirements.
Upgrading old storage without also upgrading interfaces, protocols and networks merely shifts potential bottlenecks from one point to another within the system. Micron has now combined flash storage with PCIe NVMe in a platform using converged NVMe over fabric infrastructure that has the performance of server-based storage, yet with the ability to scale at near linear performance rates.
8TB of storage in a notebook form factor SSD!
Initially, SolidScale is launching for Linux environments, with future generations covering other software-defined storage (SDS) applications. SolidScale’s dual-purpose design gives customers a scalable, high performance block storage SDS architecture.
Engineered for the most demanding workloads, such as big data and analytics, high-performance computing, database acceleration and more, SolidScale also works as foundational NVMe over fabric infrastructure for next-generation data centers, and can form the backbone of multi-faceted file systems.
This………………………..becomes……………………..this!
Micron’s SolidScale architecture occupies a 2U node in a 24U server rack enclosure. Key features of SolidScale include:
- Flexible Infrastructure – the logical volume feature of the SolidScale platform provides flexibility to create and manage a single, centralized pool of storage that allows customers to create right size volumes for each server’s data repository.
- Optimized Performance – The speed of Micron NVMe SSDs coupled with high-bandwidth Mellanox fabric delivers performance that scales by adding an average of five microseconds of additional latency to an application’s data path when compared to a local in-server NVMe. Micron SolidScale architecture is expected to reduce end-to-end latency under 200 microseconds. Preliminary tests of the Micron SolidScale platform measured over 10.9 million IOPS with only three 2U SolidScale nodes.
- Simple Manageability – The Web-based management interface of the SolidScale platform provides a simple, graphical setup and configuration for key data services.
- Seamless Scalability – Micron SolidScale architecture enables customers to easily scale storage capacity with, or independently from, compute; in addition, performance scales efficiently as more nodes are added.
- Breakthrough Data Center Efficiency – The SolidScale architecture pools the available storage together, providing a platform that can either do the same work with fewer servers or more work in the same number of servers. Overall, this allows compute servers to be thinner, allowing storage to scale independently of compute.
Micron is currently supplying the SolidScale architecture to key customers and partners to test their own application workloads within existing data center environments.
Based on validation and testing of the architecture, Micron expects to begin volume production of the SolidScale platform in early 2018. For other customers interested in participating in testing and validation of SolidScale across their own platforms, they should visit www.micron.com/solidscale.
