Diablo Memory Channel Storage Architecture Gains Traction
TORONTO — Diablo Technologies’ Memory Channel Storage (MCS) architecture is making its way into more servers. The company recently announced its technology will be integrated into latest edition of Lenovo's X6 servers to power its eXFlash MCU products. The news comes on the heels of Diablo announcing its legal issues with Netlist have been resolved.
Litigation had been ongoing since December 13, 2013; Netlist accused Diablo of stealing its flagship proprietary technology, HyperCloud, for Diablo’s ULLtraDIMM product. Diablo filed a lawsuit against Netlist a year later for unfair business practices that violated Diablo’s Intellectual Property rights, which led to a preliminary injunction against the company for controller chips used by SanDisk in its high-speed ULLtraDIMM SSD product line. This meant Diablo was banned from manufacturing, using, distributing or selling the high-speed memory chips.
In late April, Diablo announced in a press release "the United States District Court for the Northern District of California ruled to completely dissolve a preliminary injunction enacted in January 2015. The ruling definitively reaffirms Diablo’s right to ship its award-winning Memory Channel Storage (MCS) chipset without restriction." The rules comes after Diablo won it called a “decisive victory” in late March, where a federal Jury ruled unanimously in favor of the company.
Lenovo’s new X6 rack and blade servers support up to 32 eXFlash DIMMs per system, which translates into 12.8TBs of high-performance system storage and designed for accelerating a wide range of enterprise workloads, including databases, analytics and virtualization. Lenovo acquired the x6 server product line from IBM last year.
In November 2013, just before litigation began, Diablo struck two significant strategic alliances for its MCS architecture. 60East Technologies announced it would be incorporating it into its Advanced Message Processing System (AMPS) messaging platform, while a collaboration with SanDisk has MCU being integrating with SanDisk’s ULLtraDIMM (ULL) technology for servers.
The MCS architecture connects NAND flash directly to the CPU through a server’s memory bus; persistent memory is essentially attached to the host processors of a server or storage array. This configuration allows for linear scalability in performance at extremely low latencies for high-demand enterprise applications, the company told EE Times in November 2013.
Not longer after, Micron unveiled what it claimed is a fundamentally different new processor architecture at Supercomputing 2013. Its Automata Processor speeds up the search and analysis of complex and unstructured data streams. The company told EE Times that Automata is different than conventional CPUs in that its computing fabric is made up of tens of thousands to millions of processing elements that are interconnected. Its design is based on an adaptation of memory array architecture, exploiting the inherent bit-parallelism of traditional SDRAM.
Other companies are taking an architectural approach to either improve communication with available memory or move applications closer to memory. A year ago, startup A3Cube announced a new network interface card, dubbed RONNIEE Express, designed to eliminate the I/O performance gap between CPU power and data access performance for datacenters, big data, and high-performance computing applications. By turning PCI Express into an intelligent network fabric, it can exceed existing networking technologies such as Ethernet, InfiniBand, and Fibre Channel, and improve memory latencies. Scale-out memory platform maker Violin Memory, meanwhile, has an array that allows applications such as SQL Server, SharePoint, and Exchange, as well as Windows Server Hyper-V virtualization and Server Message Block (SMB) file services, to access persistent memory directly.
Litigation had been ongoing since December 13, 2013; Netlist accused Diablo of stealing its flagship proprietary technology, HyperCloud, for Diablo’s ULLtraDIMM product. Diablo filed a lawsuit against Netlist a year later for unfair business practices that violated Diablo’s Intellectual Property rights, which led to a preliminary injunction against the company for controller chips used by SanDisk in its high-speed ULLtraDIMM SSD product line. This meant Diablo was banned from manufacturing, using, distributing or selling the high-speed memory chips.
In late April, Diablo announced in a press release "the United States District Court for the Northern District of California ruled to completely dissolve a preliminary injunction enacted in January 2015. The ruling definitively reaffirms Diablo’s right to ship its award-winning Memory Channel Storage (MCS) chipset without restriction." The rules comes after Diablo won it called a “decisive victory” in late March, where a federal Jury ruled unanimously in favor of the company.
The eXFlash DIMMs are offered in 200GB and 400GB capacities with power fail protection.
Lenovo’s new X6 rack and blade servers support up to 32 eXFlash DIMMs per system, which translates into 12.8TBs of high-performance system storage and designed for accelerating a wide range of enterprise workloads, including databases, analytics and virtualization. Lenovo acquired the x6 server product line from IBM last year.
In November 2013, just before litigation began, Diablo struck two significant strategic alliances for its MCS architecture. 60East Technologies announced it would be incorporating it into its Advanced Message Processing System (AMPS) messaging platform, while a collaboration with SanDisk has MCU being integrating with SanDisk’s ULLtraDIMM (ULL) technology for servers.
The MCS architecture connects NAND flash directly to the CPU through a server’s memory bus; persistent memory is essentially attached to the host processors of a server or storage array. This configuration allows for linear scalability in performance at extremely low latencies for high-demand enterprise applications, the company told EE Times in November 2013.
Not longer after, Micron unveiled what it claimed is a fundamentally different new processor architecture at Supercomputing 2013. Its Automata Processor speeds up the search and analysis of complex and unstructured data streams. The company told EE Times that Automata is different than conventional CPUs in that its computing fabric is made up of tens of thousands to millions of processing elements that are interconnected. Its design is based on an adaptation of memory array architecture, exploiting the inherent bit-parallelism of traditional SDRAM.
Other companies are taking an architectural approach to either improve communication with available memory or move applications closer to memory. A year ago, startup A3Cube announced a new network interface card, dubbed RONNIEE Express, designed to eliminate the I/O performance gap between CPU power and data access performance for datacenters, big data, and high-performance computing applications. By turning PCI Express into an intelligent network fabric, it can exceed existing networking technologies such as Ethernet, InfiniBand, and Fibre Channel, and improve memory latencies. Scale-out memory platform maker Violin Memory, meanwhile, has an array that allows applications such as SQL Server, SharePoint, and Exchange, as well as Windows Server Hyper-V virtualization and Server Message Block (SMB) file services, to access persistent memory directly.
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