Devoted to hardware, software, IT issues, and information technology management

I ran across an interesting post on The Register that discussed a partnership between AMD and Violin Memory to marry Violin's Memory Attached Storage (MAS) solution to AMD's HyperTransport technology high-speed interconnect.  This means you could have a huge DRAM appliance attached to an Opteron-based server providing the following benefits over disk:

• Lower power consumption
• Higher performance
• Greater reliability (no platters spinning a several thousand RPM)

The full press release on the AMD and Violin Memory collaboration can be found on Violin Memory's site, but the most important bits are as follows:

"The combined technology offering will cost-effectively extend server memory to Terabytes with significant reductions in power consumption, while increasing system reliability and availability.

Under the agreement, Violin and AMD will use HyperTransport technology to enable Violin 1010 Memory Appliances to connect directly with AMD Opteron processor-based servers and extend main memory resources.  The cache coherency protocol of HyperTransport technology will enable several processors to share extensive memory resources from one or more Violin Memory Appliances.  This extended memory model will enable these servers to support much larger datasets."

Violin Memory was just founded in 2005 and had only announced their first Terabyte scale memory appliance, the Violin 1010, last August.  According to the product page for this appliance, a single 2U appliance can support 84 Violin Memory Modules (VIMMs).  Each module supports 6 GBytes of DRAM, which provides for total appliance capacity of 504 GBytes.  If you fill a standard 42U rack, that's roughly 10TB of storage.

This all sounds great, but based on the $50,000 pricetag for their 120GB "Starter Kit", I'm guessing they're really going to have to market this well to compete against traditional storage or remain a "niche" solution for High Performance Computing (HPC).