Hewlett-Packard and SanDisk today announced an agreement to jointly develop “Storage Class Memory” (SCM) that could replace DRAM and would be 1,000 times faster than NAND flash.
The two companies will market their SCM products for use in enterprise cloud infrastructures based on HP’s memristor (a revolutionary form of resistor), which it has been developing for at least five years, and SanDisk’s ReRAM memory technology.
The resulting non-volatile memory technology is expected to be up to 1,000 times faster while offering up to 1,000 times more endurance than flash storage, the companies said.
It is also expected to offer significant cost, power, density and persistence improvements over DRAM technologies, according to Siva Sivaram, executive vice president of memory technology at SanDisk.
The SCM portfolio will eventually ship as enterprise SAS, SATA and PCIe-attached products that can be used to replace DRAM, and supplement NAND flash as a higher tier memory.
The SCM technology will be byte-addressable like DRAM, and its characteristics are intended to allow systems to employ tens of terabytes of SCM cache per server node for applications such as in-memory databases, real-time data analytics, and transactional and high-performance computing.
“This is a large marketplace,” Sivaram said.
The SCM technology that HP and SanDisk are working on is focused on addressing the massive streams of data generated by the convergence of social media, security, mobility, big data analytics, cloud and the Internet of Things.
The partnership aims for the companies to augment their existing flash memory-based SSD product lines with the new memory technology, providing high-performance storage solutions to enterprise data centers.
It also aims to contribute to HP’s The Machine, a new storage architecture that uses memory and storage to bring processing closer to the data, embed security control points throughout the hardware and software stacks, and enable management and assurance of the system at scale.
“The onslaught of data facing enterprises will continue to be a challenge for the foreseeable future. We are excited to be working with SanDisk as they share an understanding of the significance of this challenge, and more importantly share a vision that the solution lies within memory-driven computing,” Martin Fink, HP’s chief technology officer, said in a statement. “Together, we will bring new memory solutions to market and accelerate adoption in the enterprise, while simultaneously advancing HP’s development of The Machine to enable a new computing model over the long term.”