Western digital ultrastar dc me200 accelerates memory computing segment

Western Digital has been working on software to convert SSDs to virtual memory, so applications speed up without having to implement DRAM or be constrained by memory capacity. The new step has been taken with Western Digital Ultrastar DC ME200.

Western Digital Ultrastar DC ME200 enters memory computing segment

The firm said the Western Digital Ultrastar DC ME200 is an optimized Ultrastar SN200 SSD, which uses 15nm planar NLC MAND and is integrated with third-party software. This provides the functionality of the replacement memory management unit (MMU), and virtualizes the SSD to form a virtual memory pool with the DRAM of the host system.

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MMUs translate software references from virtual memory address system to physical memory addresses, usually DRAM. The virtual address space is usually larger than the available DRAM, and the required blocks or pages of data are brought into memory from storage devices such as disks or SSDs.

Such paging by Western Digital Ultrastar DC ME200 provides slower data access than if the data were already resident in the DRAM. A software MMU can be used to extend the virtual memory pool beyond the DRAM to, as in this case, NAND. The WD software runs as a hypervisor on the unsupported server with Linux and the application software runs on top of it on the stack, which means there is no need to switch to use the virtual and extended memory pool.

The effect is that most of an application's working set runs in virtual memory, and runs faster than if it were operating in a smaller pool of pure DRAM memory with data fetched from SSDs. For example:

• Memcached has a DRAM performance of 85-91 percent with 4-8x memory expansion since ME200Redis has a DRAM performance of 86-94 percent with 4x memory expansionMySQL has a DRAM performance of 74-80 percent with 4-8x memory expansionSGEMM has 93% DRAM performance with 8x memory expansion

Western Digital has been exploring the technology with clients and PoC for over a year. In addition to speeding up applications with limited memory, the company said its memory expansion units can be used to consolidate server CPUs and / or to reduce the number of server nodes.

Target application areas are Redis, Memcached, Apache Spark, and large-scale databases, where the ME200 provides increased capabilities over current storage class memory products, i.e.Optane.