Intel formally introduced the Optane DC persistent memory modules late last week, an entirely new class of memory and storage technology designed to sit between storage and memory and provide expanded memory capacity and faster access to data.
Unlike SSDs, which plug into a PCI Express slot, Optane DC is built like a thick memory DIMM and plugs into the DIMM slots. Many server motherboards offer as many as eight DIMM slots per CPU, so some can be allocated to Optane and some to traditional memory.
That’s important because Optane serves as a cache of sorts, storing frequently accessed data in its memory rather than forcing the server to fetch it from a hard disk. So, server memory only has to access Optane memory, which is sitting right next to it, and not a storage array over Fibre Channel.
Lisa Spelman, vice president and general manager of Xeon products, said at the event and in a concurrent blog post that the new memory modules will ship to select customers later this year and will become generally available in 2019.
The modules will be available in 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB capacities. However, they’ll be compatible only with Intel’s Xeon Scalable server processors, which is their latest generation based on the Skylake architecture.
“By expanding affordable system memory capacities [greater than 3 terabytes per CPU socket], end customers can use systems enabled with this new class of memory to better optimize their workloads by moving and maintaining larger amounts of data closer to the processor and minimizing the higher latency of fetching
