Non-volatile DIMM cards with NAND and DRAM coming soon

Computer World writes Viking Technology and Micron are preparing to ship non-volatile memory boards that combine DRAM and NAND flash memory. Designed to be used in servers and storage arrays, these cards offers 10GB/s of throughput and promise higher endurance as writes can be offloaded to the DRAM. Viking Technology plans 16GB versions later this year and a 32GB version in 2014, both modules will have twice the amount of SLC NAND flash memory than DRAM on the card. Micron demonstrated a 8GB model with 4GB DRAM and plans to ship a 32GB version with 16GB DRAM later this year.

Adrian Proctor, Viking's vice president of marketing, said the NV DIMMs can actually extend the life of SSDs because they offload writes.

"This is all about performance," said Proctor, who was demonstrating the NVDIMM board at SNW here today. "This is not a replacement for SSDs. It's for use in conjunction with SSDs."

The NVDIMM can achieve up to 1.5 million 4K block I/Os per second or 10GB/s throughput, Proctor said.

Current cards are shipping to a couple of systems manufacturers with 8GB NAND flash, which is twice the amount of DRAM on the card.