Enterprise NAND—Some Industry Perspective

We’ve had tremendous feedback from customers, partners, media and analysts on our Enterprise NAND announcement.  So I thought I’d include a couple of perspectives from the industry on the potential impact of Enterprise NAND:

• “a significant milestone for the industry, one that’s likely to increase confidence in the technology.”
—Bob Merritt, analyst
InternetNews.com

• “proves wrong all those people who think that high-endurance devices will never be supported by advancing lithographies.”
—Jim Handy, analyst
Enterprise Storage Forum

• “Micron made a major announcement this week touting a new memory structure that simultaneously drives up the density and write performance of current Flash memory.”
IT Business Edge

Huge Reliability from Tiny NAND

Since introducing our 34nm NAND nearly a year ago, we’ve made big  strides in both performance and reliability. Now, nearly all of our NAND products are built on 34nm—leading the industry in density and efficiency.

In fact, our 34nm process is so solid, we’ve even moved our super-high cycling Enterprise NAND parts to it. We just announced 34nm SLC and MLC Enterprise NAND parts that can hit 300,000 and 30,000 cycles, respectively. These new parts deliver unmatched density, cost-efficiency, and reliability and will open up new potential for NAND storage in enterprise applications.  Watch my quick explanation below to understand why.

Is NAND Ready For Enterprise Applications?

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about NAND in enterprise applications. Can NAND hit enterprise requirements? Will sub-40nm NAND ever serve this market? Is it really a compelling choice? Put simply: yes. Here are a few reasons why:

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Beyond MLC NAND: Some Perspective

There has been quite a buzz in the industry lately about NAND flash products that are capable of storing more than two bits per cell, so I wanted to just take a minute and provide our perspective.

Simply put–what ultimately matters is having the lowest cost-per-bit solution in volume production at a given moment in time, not how many bits per cell are stored. Now, that said, there’s no question that being able to store more bits per cell results in lower cost.  However, there are some serious trade-offs that we think make this option not viable at this time.  Most notably–performance and reliability suffer.  In fact, we estimate that the performance (measured in write-cycle throughput) for going from two to three bits per cell using the same NAND architecture and process technology could be as much as halved. And reliability, (measured in write-cycle endurance) could be up to an order of magnitude worse (yes—up to 10x worse).  Scary stuff. Because having a product that may have a lower bit cost, but doesn’t meet today’s level of performance and reliability limits the value of that product.  It’s also worth noting the greater burden on the system implementation of going beyond today’s well-understood MLC technology, such as making sure the controller provides adequate ECC coverage.

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Violin Memory Plays an Enterprising Flash-y Tune

Greetings all—I’m Donpaul Stephens, president of Violin Memory. If you’re not familiar with us, we make memory appliances for applications that demand very high IOP/s or low latency for use in data-center operations. Micron’s Kevin Kilbuck and I were talking the other day and we thought it might be interesting for me to write a quick post on our work with Micron re: the enterprise space and NAND Flash memory.

We started working with Micron a little more than a year ago to leverage their work in NAND flash and look for ways to use those innovations to enable our own plans for our products. Ultimately it’s really a symbiotic relationship where each company can bring requirements, breakthroughs, goals, napkin sketches, all-the-above, to the table to understand the capabilities and (frankly) the wish lists for NAND in the storage space. Through that relationship, we learned about the work they were doing to extend the lifespan of NAND. This was right up our alley–because what they were proposing was a new NAND flash technology that was going to hit one million write cycles.  They dubbed it Enterprise NAND.

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Enterprise-Class NAND: Coming to a Server Near You

Hey guys. The MAST folks asked me to get the blog up to speed on a very exciting announcement—our Enterprise NAND. In a nutshell, Enterprise NAND is a very high endurance SLC NAND device.  It has a write/erase cycle endurance of 1 million cycles. Seriously cool–that’s 10X standard NAND. So, what does it mean? Well, it means that NAND, in its various flavors, can play and perform in everything from thumb drives to performance SSDs and now, it also has a home in high endurance, high-transaction applications like data servers. And with the kinds of endorsements it’s getting from the likes of Sun Microsystems and Violin memory, I think we’re seeing NAND really come into its own. Anyway, check out the short video and the announcement for more info.

Carpet Wear & Pizza Boxes: SSD Performance & Endurance

So Micron is a co-chair on the task group within JEDEC that’s working to better define SSD standards.  We work with others in the industry to define the future standards that will apply to SSD products with the goal of  defining a shared language for building, testing, and measuring solid state storage products.  So because we’re so heavily involved in driving these new standards, I always enjoy hearing new claims of SSD performance and endurance.  Sometimes I’m impressed … oftentimes it’s just good to see others catch-up…

In order to help folks better understand some of the claims out there, I thought I’d provide a quick overview on managing NAND on an SSD as well as some background on wear-leveling concepts.

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HDD & SSD Counseling: “Prunes are Great!”

Unlike an SSD that has a measured and graceful life span–with time to coordinate a retirement, HDDs often die with absolutely no warning. And this traumatic event often takes our most valuable information to the grave. Our fifth “Counseling Session” video allows us to lament with poor HDD, as he mourns the nature of his mortality and worries about his own impending, and unpredictable, demise.