Despite crippling losses, filing for Chapter 11, massive job cuts, the abrupt departure of its CEO and CFO, a search for somebody to buy it or merge with it, incapacitating debt, delisting threats and a patent suit, Spansion, the spun-off former AMD-Toshiba joint venture, has finally reached the jumping-off point it’s been aiming to get to for a couple of years now. It’s going to try to disrupt the industry by substituting NOR Flash for conventional server main memory.
This is not the NOR that goes into cell phones.
This is enterprise-grade NOR in a DIMM form factor, stuff that Google, Facebook and all the top sites are reportedly looking at.
It’s meant to solve the problem of today’s typical x86 servers not being able to support the giant datasets people are currently trying to force down their throats because of their limited DRAM capacity, a solution other than simply throwing more poorly utilized servers at the problem.
Spansion’s widgetry is called EcoRAM and it’s supposed to be way faster, cheaper and cooler than DRAM in read-intensive environments.
Forget write-intensive situations, they’re not NOR’s strong suite but Spansion claims an outrageously high 60x performance improvement – sweet Lord, 60x – on oil and gas modeling and visualization applications, for instance.
The Stanford Exploration Project, the industry-funded research consortium, used it to reduce the processing time on multi-terabyte datasets and was reportedly able to visualize half-terabyte datasets on typical x86 servers for the first time. Stanford said the data reorganization step in its processing flow was cut from 22 hours to 22 minutes.
EcoRAM is supposed to be the first technology to make near real-time analysis possible.
It’s also supposed to improve the performance of certain read-intensive Internet applications – like search and social networking – up to a whopping great 50x – to repeat 50x, numbers nobody’s used to – over tradition DRAM + hard drive server platforms.
EcoRAM expands main system memory eight-16 times the capacity of a typical x86 server and with as much as half-a-terabyte – that’s 512GB – of EcoRAM data doesn’t constantly have to shuffle back and forth between the hard disk and the DRAM. Instead large datasets are stored directly in the Flash memory, speeding up performance because the data is hugging the CPU.
And with maybe as much as an 8:1 consolidation rate, EcoRAM releases a considerable amount of data center real estate and saves an awful lot of TCO.
Then figure a 4GM DRAM DIMM needs 10W of power. Spansion says its 32GB EcoRAM DIMM only uses 10W of power.
The company claims a 75% reduction in energy costs over four years, a 75% reduction in footprint and a 45% reduction in CAPEX for an overall TCO reduction of 65%.
It figures 1,250 of its servers each fitted with 128GB of its widgetry can replace 5,000 traditional servers each fitted with 32GB of DRAM.
Spansion currently has two server OEMs, Virident Systems and Appro, exploiting the widgetry. Virident, a start-up that Spansion owns a piece of, is optimizing those two web favorites, MySQL and Memcached, with the widgetry (see separate story). And Appro is going after the HPC and oil and gas markets with two-socket and four-socket systems. Figure up to 256GB of EcoRAM in the first and 526GB in the second.
Spansion is also supposed to be working with other server OEMs applying EcoRAM to Hadoop clusters. Hadoop is the increasing popular open source framework used in Internet server clusters to reorganize and analyze huge and fast-changing datasets.
EcoRAM is now available in capacities of 32GB per DIMM. The widgetry currently works only on AMD boxes.
Jan Silverman, the VP of Spansion’s Server & Storage Business Unit, said that when Spansion started on its adventure “Intel was not a good choice.” Intel still had that old-fashioned bus and Opteron’s HyperTransport widgetry brought something to the party. Since Intel is currently on top that’s going to have to change for Spansion to make a real impression.
EcoRAM is compatible with a number of 64-bit Linux applications. To support Windows, Microsoft is going to have to be persuaded to make a few changes in its operating system, Silverman said.
Since it’s best at read-intensive situations, Spansion figures that makes it ripe for analytics, bioinformatics, business intelligence and the government besides the Internet and oil and gas.
The widgetry supports read latencies in the hundreds of nanoseconds, which makes it competitive with DRAM latencies, 10,000 times faster than hard drives and maybe as much as 100x times faster that state-of-the-art solid state drives.
Spansion says read bandwidth reaches up to 2.2 GB/s, which is 20x your typical 100 MB/s enterprise-class hard disks. Write performance is supposed to be comparable to high-speed enterprise-class hard disks, which are in the hundreds of MB/s.
The widgetry includes an accelerator – which lets servers address EcoRAM like it was DRAM – and Linux driver software. Spansion is currently using CentOS. It’s waiting for certification on Red Hat and SUSE.
The company says its EcoRAM architecture – which still calls for DRAM DIMMs because the server’s operating system and apps run faster out of DRAM – was designed to leverage upcoming high-speed connectivity solutions from both Intel and AMD.
Silverman said OEMs should figure the price of a 32GB of EcoRAM coming in under the going rate for an 8GB quad-ranked ECC DRAM on a per gigabyte basis. Spansion’s goal is to get it below 4GB.
According to IDC, the Internet and analytics market for x86 servers will reach $5 billion this year.