Huawei: Our servers are a flash in the DRAM – thanks, SanDisk

Huawei has swooped onto SanDisk for flash DIMMs to soup up its RH8100 servers. Flash DIMMs plug lumps of large NAND storage straight into a system's CPU memory bus rather than the slower PCIe bus that server flash cards typically use. The benefit, in theory, is that applications run faster because they wait less for IO – all …

[Dr. Mouse]

Now I may be wrong here, but everything I have read on this contradicts what you have said.

They may or may not have a cache attached, like any SSD, but AFAIK the storage is flash. I do not believe it is physically possible for them to fit 200+GB of DRAM on a DIMM, or we would have seen them before. Also, the speeds quoted (for a single module) are in the region of SSDs (SATA SSDs around 550MB/s, these modules 1GB/s), which is WAY lower than RAM.

What makes them so fast is a mixture of fast flash (as is used on PCIe flash cards) and lack of interface bandwidth bottleneck. They also have a much lower latency due to inherent properties of the memory bus.

[Anonymous Coward]

Niche Market

They are faster and more expensive than SSDs but they are slower and more expensive than DRAM

That spells niche market...slot machines and ATMs prime candidates.

[Dr. Mouse]

Re: Niche Market

Database servers and large data analysis systems, too.

Oh, and I'd shove one in my desktop if I could.

Come to think of it, if I could get lower capacity (and cheaper) ones, they'd be great for embedded machines. A single DIMM instead of a HDD/SSD (with all the additional cabling etc) would be great.

The more I think of them, the more uses I can see. I'm pretty sure they will be the future (storage on DIMMS, not necessarily using flash).