Crucial, a leading global brand of memory and storage upgrades, today announced the availability of Nonvolatile DIMM (NVDIMM) server memory to help companies protect data in the event of a system power loss. Historically, companies have used uninterruptible power supplies, solid state drives (SSDs), mechanical hard drives (HDDs) or other devices to ensure the security of critical data. While this method of preserving critical data has been effective, the backup and restore times have been very long due to the latency and write times of the SSD and HDD. Today’s applications such as relational databases, scale-out storage, data analytics, and in-memory databases require much faster backup and restore times.
NVDIMM will back up all DRAM data to the NAND while utilizing a backup power source, known as an ultracapacitor. The DRAM on the NVDIMM ensures critical data can be operated on from a low-latency memory space without the risk of losing it. The NAND on the module ensures that the contents of the DRAM are not lost during a power failure, making the DRAM persistent. When power is restored to the system, the data in the NAND is restored on the DRAM.
During normal operation, NVDIMMs perform identically to RDIMMs, and servers recognize them as such. Critical data such as transaction logs, meta-data, and database logs are written at the speed of DRAM, which for current NVDIMMs is at 2133 MT/s.
“NVDIMM is a persistent memory solution for companies who have valuable data they need to protect in case of a power outage,” said Michael Moreland, worldwide product manager, Crucial. “Combining DRAM and NAND, Crucial NVDIMMs safeguard data during power loss, remove I/O bottlenecks that hold servers back, and increase the performance of server applications.”
- NVDIMMs are a new persistent memory category. They use the system’s memory bus to deliver significant increased application performance
- NVDIMMs combine the performance of DRAM with the persistence of NAND
- Ultracapacitor, in a 2.5” drive bay form factor, provides power to NVDIMMs during the
backup operation
- System memory speeds start at 2133 MT/s with JEDEC-standard interface
