While most of the headlines around data center upgrades focus on the latest performance-packed processors, Micron Technology doesn’t want anyone to forget that memory and storage will be key to the future of data centers as well.
The company Wednesday launched availability for a new portfolio of fourth-generation solid-state drives--the Micron 7400 SSD with NVMe--aimed at meeting the growing memory and storage needs of data centers facing rising floods of data.
“The biggest challenge in the data center today is that it is literally drowning under data,” said Raj Hazra, senior vice president and general manager of the Compute and Networking Business Unit at Micron. “We’re experiencing unforeseen amounts of data from a plethora of workloads.”
That view was echoed by Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy, who joined Hazra and Jeremy Werner, corporate vice president and general manager of the Storage Business Unit at Micron, for a webcast during which Micron made its announcement.
“We create more data in a day than we used to create in weeks and months,” Moorhead said. “When we hear about the future of data centers all we hear about is the processors.”
Werner added, “There is no doubt processors are an important part of the data center, but without access, processors don’t mean much.” The increasingly critical ability to analyze data and generate insights from it for use cases like autonomous driving and IoT also relies on the ability to store and move data, he said. That means memory and storage capabilities need to be rethought.
Part of Micron’s answer to these needs to bring an array of SSD form factors into a data center environment that it said is evolving from homogeneous to heterogeneous. The seven form factors in the new portfolio aim to deliver fast, reliable and affordable data center storage across a range of use cases, the company said.
The Micron 7400 SSD includes the only PCIe Gen4 M.2 22x80mm with power loss protection, along with a capacity range between 400GB and 7.68TB. It also features 2.5-inch U.3 data center SSDs in 15mm and 7mm thickness versions. Notably, it more than doubles the input/output operations per watt and throughput of PCIe Gen 3 drives, while supporting backward compatibility with Gen 3. In addition, one to three drive writes per day can be supported for read-and-write-intensve applications.
The portfolio also features three different sizes from the new E1.S Enterprise and Data Center SSD Form Factor. That allows for greater density, flash-optimized performance, and improved power and cooling options, Micron said. It also supports the Open Compute Projects.
“Heterogeneous memory and storage systems will allow data centers to more efficiently use and move and place data in different ways for different access needs,” Werner said.
Moorhead added, “You might say there are so many form factors here, but the idea of a homogeneous data center is in the past. Give customers what they want and give them the ability to optimize it.”