Product brief Data Center Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory The Challenge of Keeping Up With Data Every Day, the Amount of Data Created Across the World is Exploding to New Levels Every day, the amount of data created across the world is exploding to new levels. Businesses thrive on this data to make critical decisions, gain new insights, and differentiate services. The demand for memory capacity is growing at an insatiable rate and there is a need to keep larger amounts of data closer to the CPU. The technology that dominates traditional main memory, DRAM, is fast to access, but small, expensive, and volatile. Storage is large, cheap, persistent, but is slow to access. There is a huge latency and bandwidth penalty as you jump from RAM based memory and disk based storage. The ever increasing amount of data and the need to access more of it quickly have further magnified the gap. Intels breakthrough product, Intel Optane DC persistent memory, is disrupting the traditional memory-storage hierarchy by creating a new tier to fill the memory- storage gap providing greater overall performance, efficiency, and affordability. iNterNet tecHNoLoGY coMPLeteS tHe HierArcHY DRAM HOT TIER MEMORY iMProViNG PERSISTENT MeMorY StorAGe MEMORY STORAGE iMProViNG SSd StorAGe deLiVeriNG iNteL 3d NANd SSd efficieNt StorAGe HDD / TAPE COLD TIERIntel Optane DC persistent memory brings an entirely new Introducing Intel Optane DC memory tier that has new properties of performance and Persistent Memory persistence, and architects and developers are using it The new Intel Optane DC persistent memory introduces as a springboard for innovation taking advantage of new a new category that sits between memory and storage and usages around restart and replication, groundbreaking will deliver the best of both worlds through the convergence performances from breaking system bottlenecks that used of memory and storage product traits. Intel Optane DC to severely constrain workloads, and making use of what persistent memory is available in capacities of 128 GiB, could be considered the worlds tiniest, but fastest storage 256 GiB and 512 GiB and is a much larger alternative to device sitting on a memory bus. DRAM which currently caps at 128 GiB. With this new flexible tier of products, designers and developers will have Operational Modes access to large capacity and affordable memory that is The Intel Optane DC persistent memory has two operating both flexible (volatile or non-volatile) and serves as a high- modes: Memory Mode and App Direct Mode. With distinct performance storage tier. They will also have the option operating modes, customers have the flexibility to take of application managed memory which is vital to optimize advantage of Intel Optane DC persistent memory benefits system performance. The low, consistent latency, combined across multiple workloads. with high bandwidth, Quality of Service (QoS) and endurance of this unique Intel technology will mean more capacity Memory Mode Memory Mode is great for large memory and more virtual machines (VMs) for cloud and virtualized capacity and does not require application changes which users, much higher capacity for in-memory databases makes Intel Optane DC persistent memory easy to adopt. without prohibitive price tags, super-fast storage, and larger In Memory Mode, the Intel Optane DC persistent memory memory pools. Ultimately, Intel can deliver higher system extends the amount of available volatile memory visible to performance with larger memory that is 3X the performance the Operating System. DRAM is used as Cache for the Intel of NVMe-SSD, with much higher endurance than NAND SSDs Optane DC persistent memory. The CPU memory controller for write-intensive workloads. uses the DRAM as cache and the Intel Optane DC persistent memory as addressable main memory. Virtualization can The persistent memory modules are DDR4 socket comp- benefit from Intel Optane DC persistent memory in Memory atible and can co-exist with conventional DDR4 DRAM Mode because there is larger memory capacity which DIMMs on the same platform. The module fits into provides more VMs and more memory per VM at a lower standard DDR4 DIMM slots on 2nd Generation Intel Xeon cost compared to DRAM. Workloads that are I/O bound can Scalable processors. Deigned with and optimized for the also benefit from using Memory Mode as the Intel Optane 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, a user DC persistent memory provides larger memory capacity can have up to one Intel Optane DC persistent memory which supports larger databases and at a lower cost per channel and up to six on a single socket providing up compared to DRAM. With increased capacity there is greater to 3 TiB of Intel Optane DC persistent memory which VM, container, and application density which increases means an 8 socket system could access up to 24 TiB of the utilization of the 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable system memory. The module is compatible with 2nd processors. The data in the Intel Optane DC persistent Generation Intel Xeon Gold and Platinum processor SKUs. memory when used in Memory Mode is volatile as it is Intel Optane DC persistent memory is big, affordable, and handled with a single encryption key that upon power persistent which makes extracting more value from larger down is discarded making the data inaccessible. data sets than previously possible. This new technology App Direct Mode In App Direct Mode, software and can solve issues for customers and launch a revolution applications have the ability to talk directly to the Intel in the data center. Finally an affordable alternative to Optane DC persistent memory, which reduces complexity expensive DRAM, that can deliver HUGE capacity and in the stack. There is the option of having App Direct Mode can accommodate demanding workloads and emerging use legacy storage APIs. This allows it to act like an SSD and applications like in-memory databases (IMDB). When can boot an OS. The operating system sees Intel Optane deployed, Intel Optane DC persistent memory can help DC persistent memory and DRAM as two separate pools improve TCO via not just memory savings, but broadly of memory. It is persistent like storage, byte addressable via reduced SW licensing costs, node reduction, power like memory, cache coherent which extends the usage of efficiencies, and other operational efficiencies. persistent memory outside the local node, and consistent Not only can Intel Optane DC persistent memory bring cost low latency supporting larger datasets. The power of savings, it can improve infrastructure consolidation making persistent memory adds business resilience to systems with your servers do more. Intel Optane DC persistent memory faster restart times because data is retained even during can spur major infrastructure consolidation. The increase power cycles. Memory bound workloads benefit from Intel in memory size from Intel Optane media provide the Optane DC persistence with its large capacity and higher opportunity to consolidate workloads that have been endurance and greater bandwidth compared to NAND SSDs. spread across several nodes, leaving CPUs underutilized, Dual Mode a sub-set of App Direct, can be provisioned to concentrating and consolidating workloads on fewer so that some of the Intel Optane DC persistent memory is nodes, ultimately saving on the deployments necessary in Memory Mode and the remaining is in App Direct Mode. and maximizing CPU utilization. Each Node does more, In Dual Mode, applications can take advantage of high and the CPU can do more. performance storage without the latency of moving data to and from the I/O bus. 2