Last months GreyBeards on Storage podcast was with Rob Peglar, CTO and Sr. VP of Symbolic IO. Most of the discussion was on their new storage product but what also got my interest is that they are developing their storage system using NVDIMM technologies.
In the past I would have called NVDIMMs NonVolatile RAM but with the latest incarnation it’s all packaged up in a single DIMM and has both NAND and DRAM on board. It looks a lot like 3D XPoint but without the wait.
The first time I saw similar technology was at SFD5 with Diablo Technologies and SANdisk, a Western Digital company (videos here and here). At that time they were calling them UltraDIMM and memory class storage. ULTRADIMMs had an onboard SSD and DRAM and they provided a sort of virtual memory (paged) access to the substantial (SSD) storage behind the DRAM page(s). I wrote two blog posts about UltraDIMM and MCS (called MCS, UltraDIMM and memory IO, the new path ahead part1 and part2).
NVDIMM defined
NVDIMMs are currently available today from Micron, Crucial, NetList, Viking, and probably others. With today’s NVDIMM there is no large SSD (like ULTRADIMMs, just backing flash) and the complete storage capacity is available from the DRAM in the NVDIMM. At power reset, the NVDIMM sort of acts like virtual memory paging in data from the flash until all the data is in DRAM.
NVDIMM hardware includes control logic, DRAM, NAND and SuperCAPs/Batteries together in one DIMM. DRAM is used for normal memory traffic but in the case of a power outage, the data from DRAM is offloaded onto the NAND in the NVDIMM using the SuperCAP/Battery to hold up the DRAM memory just long enough to transfer it to flash..
Th problem with good, old DRAM is that it is volatile, which means when power is gone so is your data. With NVDIMMs (3D XPoint and other new non-volatile storage class memories also share this characteristic), when power goes away your data is still available and persists across power outages.
For example, Micron offers an 8GB, JEDEC DDR4 compliant, 288-pin NVDIMM that has 8GB of DRAM and 16GB of SLC flash in a single DIMM. Depending on part, it has 14.9-16.2GB/s of bandwidth and 1866-2400 MT/s (million memory transfers/second). Roughly translating MT/s to IOPS, says with ~17GB/sec and at an 8KB block size, the device should be able to do ~2.1 MIO/s (million IO operations per second [never thought I would need an acronym for that]).
Another thing that makes NVDIMMs unique in the storage world is that they are byte addressable.
Hardware – check, Software?
SNIA has a NVM Programming (NVMP) Technical Working Group (TWG), which has been working to help adoption of the new technology. In addition to the NVMP TWG, there’s pmem.io, SANdisk’s NVMFS (2013 FMS paper, formerly known as DirectFS) and Intel’s pmfs (persistent memory file system) GitHub repository. Couldn’t find any GitHub for NVMFS but both pmem.io and pmfs are well along the development path for Linux.
The TWG identified a three prong approach to NVDIMM adoption: crawl, walk, run (see pmem.io blog post for more info).
- The Crawl approach uses standard block and file system drivers on Linux to talk to a NVDIMM driver. This way has the benefit of being well tested, well known and widely available (except for the NVDIMM driver). The downside is that you have a full block IO or file IO stack in front of a device that can potentially do 2.1 MIO/s and it is likely to cause a lot of overhead reducing this potential significantly.
- The Walk approach uses a persistent memory file system (pmfs?) to directly access the NVDIMM storage using memory mapped IO. The advantage here is that there’s absolutely no kernel code active during a NVDIMM data access. But building a file system or block store up around this may require some application level code.
- The Run approach wasn’t described well in the blog post but it seems like SANdisk’s NVMFS approach which uses both standard NVMe SSDs and non-volatile memory to build a hybrid (NVDIMM-SSD) file system.
Symbolic IO as another run approach?
Symbolic IO computationally defined storage is intended to make use of NVDIMM technology and in the Store [update 12/16/16] appliance version has SSD storage as well in a hybrid NVDIMM-SSD run-like solution. The appliance has a full version of Linux SymCE which doesn’t use a file system or the PMEM library to access the data, it’s just byte addressable storage with a PMEM file system embedded within [update 12/16/16]. This means that applications can use standard Linux file APIs to (directly) reference NVDIMM and the backend SSD storage.
It’s computationally defined because they use compute power to symbolically transform the data reducing data footprint in NVDIMM and subsequently in the SSD backing tier. Checkout the podcast to learn more
I came away from the podcast thinking that NVDIMMs are more prevalent than I thought. So, that’s what prompted this post.
Comments?
Photo Credit(s): UltraDIMM photo taken by Ray at SFD5, Architecture picture from pmem.io blog post,