Products based on fast persistent memory such as 3D XPoint are now available, two years after Intel and Micron announced the development of “a new class of non-volatile memory, creating the first new memory category in more than 25 years.” What applications can take full advantage of their speed even at the initial premium price (about 5 times the cost of flash)? A likely candidate is data analytics. After all, the more data enterprises can crunch, the more revenue they can generate or the most costs they can avoid or reduce. Flash Memory has already reduced response time and enabled applications which were very expensive or impossible with HDDs. Using Flash and persistent Storage Class Memories in tiers make them affordable and further enable real time analytics. A system that combines less expensive flash with persistent memory can approach the throughput and latency of an all-persistent memory implementation at much lower cost.

We will look not just at what flash memory and Storage Class Memories are, but examine system architectures and applications which exploit them.

Mr Walls is a Storage Expert with 35 years in the business. He has been with IBM his entire career and achieved the level of IBM Fellow. He is currently the CTO of IBM’s FlashSystems and is considered an expert in the field of high performance storage, SSDs, All Flash Arrays and external storage in general.

Location:
Room: 103
Bldg: ENGR
Boise State University
Boise, Idaho
83712