Both the first generation of Xeon Scalable (Skylake) and the recently launched second generation Cascadelake come prepared to take full advantage of NVME drives.
Until the advent of SSD disks, the limit was the speed of the heads and not the width of the bus. When solid state drives were evolving, there came a time when they found the limitation with the SATA 6 Gb/s bus width, so the drive could not be greater than 100.000 IOPS (Input/Output, inputs/outputs per second).
With the arrival of the new generation Intel processors, NVMe drives directly attack the 133 Gb/s PCI-E bus, since it is the processor that controls them, without the need for an intermediate bus.
This has led us to the launch of the Micron 9300 PRO and MAX disks, which are capable of reaching a read speed of 850.000 IOPS, around 10 times more than SATA and with an endurance that can reach the value of 5 the endurance is the capacity of the disk to write and flush daily without degradation of the cells.
In this way, an affordable, very fast and highly reliable disk is obtained, which leaves the conflicting 15.000 disks completely behind. RPM, which heated up and posed durability problems over time, given that these discs are totally cold, since they are at a very low consumption level. In addition, since there are no moving parts, problems related to temperature, vibration and magnetic fields, which affected conventional disks with magnetic heads, are avoided.
It is worth mentioning that in this range, we already have disks of up to 15 TB, with a reasonable price, which means that conventional disks have less and less meaning and that their days are numbered on the market.
The more than 2 million hours between failures, the 5-year guarantee and the solvency of a brand like Micron/Crucial, allow you to create configurations, which additionally take up less space, since being 2,5”, 24 drives fit in a 2U cabinet, which allows us to offer storage cabinets of more than 300 TB net with a hitherto unknown velocity, with connectivity in 10G, 25G and 100GB/s, since the bottleneck is now back in the connection network.
Additionally, Micron drives have features not offered by any other manufacturer in the world, such as addressing up to 32 NVME drives, flexible capacity, hardware encryption, power loss protection (which prevents data consistency failure) , Enterprise data path protection, preventive diagnostic tools, firmware update with signed protection, etc.
Micron's Flex Capacity feature allocates a percentage of an SSD's available space to improve performance and the drive is written to reduced capacity per day by making more space available exclusively to the SSD controller for various management functions. Flex Capacity is the ability, not just to overprovision an SSD, but to know how many times the drive writes per day and what performance you might encounter at different levels of intensive load. Flexible capacity can adjust drive performance and DWPD to changing workloads in High Performance Computing environments, and especially High-through Performance Computing and Big Data environments. Higher OP percentage decreases write amplification which extends NAND lifespan, increases performance and DWPD.
For example: An administrator has deployed an ECO 800 GB capacity drive for light use ~ 1 DFPD and standard performance expectations. Eventually, the server needs to be reused for heavy random write traffic. The 800GB drive can be overclocked to a lower capacity, decreasing the space available to the user, but increasing both performance and endurance to meet it.
The benefits are:
In addition, Sistemas Informáticos Europeos develops its SIE Ladon systems on Gigabyte platforms. Most of them have NVME bays and M.2 slots for high-performance PCI-E connection disks. In others, such as our solution of 8 GPUs (both from Tesla and Geforce) in 2U, there is a kit for less than $100, which allows you to change 2 of the 2,5" drive bays for NVME bays, to support this new disc technology.
Another fundamental highly sensitive security feature, such as hospital data, which many of our systems handle, is the need for hardware encryption, so that in the event of a disk theft, the data cannot be accessed.
Micron drives come in two versions, one with encryption and one without. The problem is that many times, this encryption is done at the software level and once in the hands of hackers computer scientists have all the time in the world to break the protection. For this reason, SIE implements Infineon SLB96xxTT1.2 security modules in its systems, 100% compatible and certified by our company with the Micron SED (Self-Encrypting Drives) such as those that we have already implemented in many clients and that we cannot mention for reasons of confidentiality.
https://trustedcomputinggroup.org/
In this way, we take a quantum leap in security. The Infineon Trusted Platform Module (TPM 1.2 firmware upgradeable to TPM 2.0) SLB 9660 is a fully standard compliant TPM that has successfully passed the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) certification process. This process verifies the correct and secure implementation of the TCG standard specification based on the TCG Common Criteria Protection Profile.
This applied to servers allows extending the basic concepts of trust to security in the cloud, virtualization and other computing platforms and services from the company toyesBig Data, Deep Learning and Machine Learning systems. even as It could be seen in the presentation of Carlos de Alfonso at HPC Admintech 2019, Docker container systems can travel, keeping their integrity intact in terms of data security, even jumping between virtualized systems.