Micron Technology, Inc. announced the first open-source, heterogeneous-memory storage engine (HSE), designed specifically for solid-state drives (SSDs) and storage-class memory (SCM). Legacy storage engines born in the era of hard disk drives (HDDs) failed to architecturally provide for the increased performance and reduced latency of next-generation non-volatile media. HSE, originally developed by Micron and now available to the open-source community, is ideal for developers using all-flash infrastructure who require the benefits of open-source software, including the ability to customize or enhance code for their unique use cases.
“As the only company developing storage class memory, flash, and DRAM technologies, Micron is uniquely positioned to build a software stack that accelerates applications running in today’s flash-based storage environments as well as storage class memory-based infrastructure of the future,” said Derek Dicker, corporate vice president and general manager of the Storage Business Unit at Micron. “We have delivered a first-of-its-kind innovation for open-source storage developers, unlocking the full potential of high-performance storage applications.”
In addition to delivering performance and endurance improvements, HSE reduces latency, especially for large-scale data sets, through intelligent data placement. HSE improves the throughput of particular storage applications by up to six times, reduces latency 11 times, and improves SSD endurance by seven times. HSE can also take advantage of multiple classes of media concurrently, such as flash and 3D XPoint technology. When a Micron X100 NVMe™ SSD, the world’s fastest SSD, is added to a set of four Micron 5210 QLC SSDs, throughput more than doubles and read latency improves nearly four times.
“We see enormous potential in the technologies being introduced by Micron, especially as it takes an innovative approach in lowering the latency between computing, memory, and storage resources,” said Stefanie Chiras, vice president and general manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux at Red Hat. “We look forward to working with Micron in the open-source community to further build out these innovations, ultimately bringing new choices to the storage world derived from open standards and concepts.”
