From Western Digital, Combined Solution of AMD EPYC Processors With Ultrastar DC ME200 Memory Extension Drive

Western Digital Corp. (WDC) announced a memory extension solution with AMD (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. ) to meet the need of a growing number of customers to scale addressable memory sizes of existing servers for business-critical in-memory workloads such as real-time analytics.

The combined solution of AMD EPYC processors with the Ultrastar DC ME200 Memory Extension Drive expands memory footprints at a higher memory-per-core ratio, in a scalable and cost-effective way.

The company exhibited at RedisConf19, April 2-3, 2019 in San Francisco, CA, on Pier 27, and showcased how the Ultrastar memory drives can help cloud architects and DevOps leverage memory drive technology in a variety of servers and iprocessors to scale Redis Labs‘s in-memory data sets for larger memory pools with lower TCO. The Redis community also learned how they can optimize Redis data management and operations for containerized microservices, conduct Redis backups, deploy multi-cloud architectures, and build innovative applications for web-scale performance.

“For customers needing access to a broader memory footprint at a higher memory-per-core ratio, a server using AMD EPYC processors and Ultrastar memory drives can scale addressable memory sizes of existing and new servers for in-memory applications and databases,” said Raghu Nambiar, CVP and CTO, datacenter ecosystems and application engineering, AMD. “This means that customers can achieve increased productivity with additional cost savings from greater addressable memory density, as well as reduced data center operations and resource consumption.“

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Introduced in October 2018, the Ultrastar DC ME200 memory extension drive is drop-in ready and PCIe-device compatible for scalable in-memory computing to address higher application performance needs and increasingly dynamic workloads and architectures. The latest version of the Ultrastar memory drive supports AMD EPYC processors so cloud architects, DevOps leaders and digital platform managers can accommodate ever-growing data sets onto larger memory pools by augmenting DRAM without requiring changes to existing Linux OS and application stacks.

The Ultrastar DC ME200 memory extension drive improves the AMD EPYC processor-based server memory-to-core ratio compared to conventional scale-out DRAM compute clusters using only DIMMs. The memory expansion scalability of the Ultrastar memory drives also enables lower TCO of in-memory infrastructure through consolidation. For example, a cluster holding 30TB of data in memory, using 30 nodes of 1TB each, can be reduced to eight nodes with 4TB system memory each, with increased per-node CPU utilization. ⁽¹⁾ The Ultrastar memory drive is a solution for in-memory database engines like SAP HANA, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft, as well as scale-out memory-centric architectures, such as, Redis, Memcached, Apache Spark and large-scale databases.

“AMD EPYC processor-based servers, combined with Ultrastar memory drives, can greatly increase the amount of overall memory per server to provide more cost-effective data center infrastructure for in-memory applications,” said Eyal Bek, VP, data center and client computing devices, Western Digital. “We are deeply committed to working with partners like AMD to improve the ability of digital business customers to grow data sets without the imposing data center infrastructure costs.“

Ultrastar DC ME200 memory extension drive
The Ultrastar memory drive is drop-in ready and PCIe-device compatible with most servers. Available in one, two and 4TB, the solution requires no modifications to the OS, system hardware, firmware or application stacks. For expandability, a 1U server can typically support up to 24TB of system memory using the Ultrastar memory drive for in-memory compute clusters. Supported server interfaces are NVMe and PCIe with either U.2 or AIC (add-in-card) HH-HL form factors.

Read also:
Western Digital In-Memory Computing With Ultrastar Memory Drive
DC ME200 memory extension drive expands servers with memory capacity for real-time data processing, scaling databases, application caching and cloud services. [with our comments]
November 13, 2018 | Press Release

Additional resources:
Solution brief: Scale Redis Memory Configurations for Larger Data Stores and Caching
WP: Expand In-Memory Capacity at a Fraction of the Cost of DRAM: AMD EPYC™ and Ultrastar
Blog: Step-by-Step Ultrastar memory drive boot process
Blog: Scaling Redis™ Memory, Data Management and Operations
Video: Memory Expansion – Ultrastar DC ME200 Memory Drives
Ultrastar DC ME200 Memory Extension Drive DS

⁽¹⁾ Memory capacity is indicated by GB and TB and based on binary values such that 1GB is equal to 230 bytes and 1TB is equal to 1,024GB. Accessible capacity can vary from stated capacity due to software, formatting, and other factors.