Podcast #79: The Future of 3D XPoint & Optane with Chris Mellor

Micron announced a shift in portfolio strategy this week and involves ceasing the development of 3D XPoint. The company stated: “Micron has now determined that there is insufficient market validation to justify the ongoing high levels of investments required to successfully commercialize 3D XPoint at scale to address the evolving memory and storage needs of its customers.” This spurred Chris Mellor to do some digging, which he is oft to do. On this podcast, I sit down with the meanest man in enterprise IT to talk Optane, Micron killing XPoint, the future of PMem, Compute Express Link (CXL), and other up-and-coming tech in the data center. (more…)
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Western Digital NVMe SSDs Take Over the Enterprise

When NVMe™ drives first came out, we knew the performance would be superior, but questioned when they would be cost-comparable to SATA SSDs. Due to their initial cost, NVMe drives were used for enterprise applications that needed to take advantage of their high-performance characteristics. It didn’t take very long for NVMe drives to become cheaper than SATA/SAS SSDs in terms of dollars-per-IOPS. But now, we are starting to reach the point where they are not that much more expensive than SATA/SAS SSDs on a capacity basis. This GB vs. dollar comparison was driven home to us when we received the Western Digital Ultrastar® DC SN640 NVMe SSD in the lab for performance testing – it offers dramatic performance improvements over SATA/SAS SSDs and targets the mainstream enterprise storage ma
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