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SanDisk announces availability of Flash DIMMs

by on21 January 2014



Flash a-ha, King of the Impossible

SanDisk made a curious announcement yesterday – the memory maker says IBM is the first vendor to start offering its ULLtraDIMMs in enterprise servers.

Developed by SanDisk and Diablo Technologies, ULLtraDIMMs promise to deliver an entirely new tier of ultra-low latency storage. The idea is to place flash storage as close as possible to the CPU, hence the standard memory bus and DIMM for factor are employed.

As a result ULLtraDIMM boasts 5 microsecond write latency and it outperforms all existing flash storage devices, including those based on the speedy PCIe bus. ULLtraDIMMs are available in capacities of 200GB and 400GB. They use 1xnm MLC flash. ULLtraDIMM modules achieve random performance of 150K/65K read/write IOPS and the sustained read/write performance stands at 760MB/s, roughly 50 percent faster than most consumer SSDs on the market today.

The kicker is compatibility. Since ULLtraDIMMs use the prolific DIMM form factor, they can be deployed in existing servers or blade systems and they are fully interoperable with RDIMMs. Needless to say the technology is limited to servers, but who knows, maybe we’ll see it in high performance PCs and laptops in a few generations.

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