Micron launches solid state drives for data centre applications
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Cloud computing is driving the development of more data centres, with more than $50billion being invested by 2014, according to Micron. In turn, this is driving the adoption of solid state drive (SSD) technology.
Responding, the company has launched a portfolio of PCI Express (PCIe) based SSDs. Called the RealSSD P320h family, the devices are said to deliver 'extreme performance and endurance'.
Kevin Dibelius, senior manager of product marketing in Micron's network storage group, said: "We have customers building three data centres in the US who have selected SSD technology. Their decision has been driven by power consumption and cost considerations."
The P320h system, which uses Micron's 34nm single level cell NAND flash technology, is available in two capacities: 350 and 700Gbyte. The NAND chips are arranged in a RAIN format – redundant arrays of independent NAND – and are accompanied by DDR3 dram and an in house designed asic which controls both types of memory.
Janene Ellefson, PCIe product marketing manager, said: "Off the shelf memory controllers are not always the best solution. Micron can get its engineers talking to each other to get the best efficiency and performance."
Ellefson noted that Micron had decided to go with single level NAND, rather than multilevel. "SLC offers better performance," she admitted. "MLC is slower and doesn't have the endurance. Because we're looking for performance in this device, we're using SLC." However, MLC is suitable for applications where there are many more reads than writes.
Sustaining data throughputs of up to 3Gbyte/s, the P320h series can reach a maximum of 750,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) for reads and 341,000 IOPS for writes.
The first products in Micron's P320h series will be available in a full height, half-length form factor, but other PCIe form factors will be introduced later this year. The P320h is now sampling, with mass production expected to begin in the third quarter.
