Micron Innovations Blog » Storage Concepts

An Enterprise-focused MLC SSD?

Scott Shadley — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 20:21:08 +0000

The enterprise SSD market used to be seen as a single tier in the storage market—a cohesive, expensive grouping above other storage options. That’s no longer true. The enterprise SSD market is also segmenting, largely because SSDs deliver several key features—low latency, reliability, and low power, to name a few—that can make dramatic differences in enterprise effectiveness across multiple applications and workloads, but they’re the most effective when they’re designed for specific applications.

Today we announced a new SSD aimed squarely at the entry level of enterprise solid-state storage. Our new RealSSD™ P400e was built for key server and blade applications, including read caching, DAS, and as a boot drive for virtual desktop infrastructures. It’s a slot that many storage architects previously attempted to fill with client SSDs, which really aren’t meant to handle 24/7, always-on workloads. Our P400e, however, was designed specifically for this space, and its excellent IOPs-per-dollar performance and low TCO makes it an easy choice to replace enterprise hard drives.

In the video below, I provide a quick explanation of enterprise SSD tiers and explain some of the key product features of the P400e SSD. As always, you can learn more about the specs of the P400e drive on micron.com.

750,000 IOPs from a Single SSD?

Janene Ellefson — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 21:43:34 +0000

As promised, the video below is a live demo of the phenomenal performance you can get from our P320h PCIe SSD. It’s a simple and straightforward IOMeter measurement, but we wanted to show you how much of a leap our card makes over current solutions—the random reads output of the P320h is more than twice as fast as the nearest competitor.

It all hinges on the tight integration we’ve been able to make between our custom controller and high-performance SLC NAND. I’m looking forward to keeping you posted on what our customers are be able to achieve with it. Enjoy the video.

Our PCIe SSD—Out of the Lab and Into Production

Janene Ellefson — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 04:22:48 +0000

If you’re an SSD fan who’s been following our blog for a while, you know that we posted a from-the-lab teaser video of a prototype PCIe SSD some time ago. Our design team has been hard at work on an ideal solution, and I’m happy to tell you that today we have production product to show you.

Of course PCIe drives aren’t anything new to the market, but I think you’ll agree that our solution offers some new breakthroughs in performance and efficiency. In the video below, I walk through some of the features of the P320h (you’ll quickly see why I’m so excited about this device).

And stay tuned; we’ll have more performance numbers and a demo posted soon.

Tech Talk: RealSSD™ C400 and the 2011 SSD Market

Kirstin Bordner — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 23:21:36 +0000

Dean Klein, Micron’s Vice President of Memory System Development, discusses the new RealSSD C400 drive and how SSDs will grow in 2011 with the influx of ultra-mobile notebooks. Dean also discusses how the leading-edge performance and capacities of the C400 are poised to serve this market.

AS Benchmarks for RealSSD C300

Justin Sykes — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:28:51 +0000

We received a couple requests to show the AS benchmark results for the new drive. So we asked Todd to provide a couple screen shots of the results–and here they are.

Of course, our immediate goal is to get these in the hands of independent reviewers. You should see third-party tests coming out in the next month or so as we ramp to production and get drives sent out. Stay tuned–we’ll call out results both here and through our @RealSSD Twitter feed.

AS SSD Benchmark: 3G Empty

AS SSD Benchmark: 6G Empty

You asked for it: RealSSD C300 random IOPs

Justin Sykes — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:40:57 +0000

A lot of people are excited about the C300 demos we posted last week, and a number of you asked to see the random read/write IOPs numbers for the new drives. So I’ve asked one of our Apps guys, Todd, to shoot a video of the C300 running through the Iometer test. These are 4K transfers on 100% random read/write tests with a queue depth of 32.

We’re using the same Intel Core2Duo system, equipped with our 256GB RealSSD C300 drive and a 6 Gb/s SATA host bus adapter. We also test it at SATA 3 Gb/s to show how it will perform in those systems. I think you’re going to like the results.

RealSSD C300 goes head-to-head with a hard drive in everyday tasks

Justin Sykes — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:46:24 +0000

By now you’ve seen our SSD vs SSD benchmarks, but to show you how that speed translates to the real world, we pitted our 256GB C300 SSD against a standard issue 7200rpm HDD in identical systems. We then tackled a handful of everyday tasks—boot up, file copy, and opening large files in Adobe® Photoshop®.

System Details
MoBo: Intel® X48 chipset based
Processor: Intel Core2Duo E8500
Memory: Micron® 2GB DDR3 1066 (PC3-8500)
OS: Windows® 7 Pro 64-b

Benchmarking the World’s Fastest Client SSD

Justin Sykes — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:32:09 +0000

Our new RealSSD C300 outperforms every client SSD currently available on the market. To prove it, we ran a few standard benchmarking tools (PCMark Vantage’s disk suite and the classic disk benchmark ATTO) on identical systems. The only difference: a 256GB Micron RealSSD C300 in one system and the leading competitor’s 160GB SSD in the other.

System Details
MoBo: Intel® X48 chipset based
Processor: Intel Core2Duo E8500
Memory: Micron® 2GB DDR3 1066 (PC3-8500)
Drive Interface: SATA 6Gb/s (via Marvel HBA)

Announcing the new RealSSD C300

Chris Smith — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:31:45 +0000

To explain why today’s announcement of Micron’s new RealSSD C300 is a game-changer for speed and storage in notebook and desktop PCs, I asked our SSD expert, Dean Klein, to share some of the thinking that went into the product and what you’ll experience the first time you boot up a computer with a RealSSD C300 inside.

Is NAND Ready For Enterprise Applications?

Kevin Kilbuck — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:30:56 +0000

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:

Multiple Routes to Quality & Reliability
More than any other segment, enterprise apps want high quality and high reliability NAND. While we create specially-designed “Enterprise NAND” that delivers super-low defect rates and high endurance for specific applications, there are other methods to increase endurance. For instance, some of our customers take advantage of the high density of our newest NAND to build systems with a surplus of capacity. Because there’s extra density, each cell is written less often, and the effective life of all the NAND goes up dramatically. Advanced wear-leveling algorithms will also provide advanced NAND with better endurance levels than it achieved in the past.

NAND Control Will See Breakthrough Innovation
Yes, developing NAND controller technology is more challenging with each process node, but it is also an area of heavy focus and technology investment. Micron, with SSD’s and other technologies in development, is ensuring that NAND is fit for the enterprise. Controllers will continue to improve along with the NAND changes—this is an area of tremendous innovation, and mirrors what occurred in HDD evolution.

Scaling—The Path Ahead
Some have suggested that only legacy process NAND is fit for enterprise applications. That’s simply not true. As noted above, there are multiple methods to achieve enterprise-class performance on advanced process NAND. And while we will continue to provide some legacy NAND for key applications, most enterprise customers will want to take advantage of the benefits new technology presents. In fact, this week we will introduce a new portfolio of ultra-reliable Enterprise NAND products designed on our mature 34nm NAND process – enabling the high density and better cost structure that only advanced process NAND can provide. Make sure to stay tuned to our blog for more on that later this week.

And we stated this summer at the Flash Memory Summit, NAND has plenty of room for further scaling improvements. Don’t let the naysayers fool you—the years ahead are going to be an exciting period of change and accelerating NAND adoption into hundreds of new applications. I’m looking forward to it.