Persistent memory is a new technology that provides ultra-fast memory, and in this video, I’m going to explain how it works and relates to other storage options.

Using the idea of a “storage pyramid,” I’ll explain the relationship between cost and performance when it comes to the different storage methods, including tape, HDD, SSD, PCIe, persistent memory (PMEM), and RAM. I’ll also take a look at how persistent memory works in both Memory Mode and App Direct Mode.

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Learn more

• SAP on IBM Cloud
• What is Cloud Storage?
• What is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)?
• VIDEO – What is SAP HANA?
• Full YouTube playlist of lightboarding videos

Video Transcript

What is persistent memory (PMEM)?

Hey guys, welcome to the channel; my name is Bradley Knapp from IBM Cloud, and I wanted to talk with you a little bit about persistent memory.

Persistent memory is a new technology—it just came onto the market this last spring, so the spring of 2019—and its ultra-, ultra-fast memory.

The storage pyramid

So if we think about our storage pyramid—we’ve got a pyramid over here. And a storage pyramid, I like to draw it out this way because we’ve kind of got two arrows, right? 

As you go up the storage pyramid like this, the cost goes up. 

And as you go down the storage pyramid like this one, your performance goes down.

Tape

And, so keeping this kind of storage pyramid in mind—down here at the bottom this is tape. Tape is still around; tape isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

HDD

The next level up from a performance perspective—slightly more expensive but more performant as well—is when you get into our good old fashioned hard disk drives, right—the spinning disks. 

SSD

Next level up from that is where you’re gonna get into your SSDs, right? Your different SSD form factors—U.2, M.2, NVMe, all of the different letters.

PCIe

The next level up in performance (but again, adding cost) is gonna be PCIe drive.

PMEM

And then the next level up—this is the one that we’re talking about today, this is PMEM (persistent memory).

RAM

And then up at the very top of our pyramid, this one right here—that’s RAM. 

The relationship between cost and performance

So, as you go up the cost goes up, but the performance level does. Why? Well, it’s because the access times go down, the seek time goes down, and the bandwidth goes up.

So, tape takes a long time to get the data to and from the processor, hard disks less time, SSD less time, right? These are limited for a number of different factors—hard disks and SSDs, they’ve gotta talk back and forth through a Raid card, going through the PCI bus.

This next level up, a PCIe drive, this goes right into the PCIe bus. So this could be a NVMe M.2 drive or one that goes in an actual PCI-E slot itself. So again, faster than SSDs, faster than hard drives; same general technology as SSD (it’s still using NAND chips), but it’s getting to that processor faster.

PMEM—if we look over here—PMEM talks back and forth to the processor directly. You don’t have to go through a PCIe bus—you’re going through the memory bus, which, again, lower latency, higher bandwidth—so it’s much, much faster. 

And then at the very top of the pyramid, that’s RAM—that’s your traditional DRAM that is the fastest storage medium.

Memory Mode

And so if we come over here I want to talk a little bit about the two modes that we run in, right? The first mode is Memory Mode. So PMEM can be switched at the BIOS level into either of these modes. 

And so if we consider our processor, right? I’m just going to mark the processor with a P. 

The processor, out of each processor you get 6 channels—we didn’t draw all of them out here—but in each channel, you’re gonna get a DIMM—a RAM DIMM—and you’re going to get a PMEM DIMM.

And then as you go down, right—so that’s slot 0 and then on slot 1 you get a RAM DIMM again, and you get a PMEM DIMM. In 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 for each processor, right?

What makes PMEM valuable?

So, in a dual-socket server, you’re gonna end up with 12 sticks of RAM, 12 sticks of PMEM. What makes PMEM valuable? Well, it’s lower cost than RAM, slightly lower performance than RAM, but it’s much larger.

So if you think about typical RAM DIMM sizes right, you got a 16, you got a 32, you get a 64, got a 128, and now you’ve got 256s, but the cost goes up dramatically as you go up in these sizes.

On the PMEM side, you start with the 128, and then you’ve also got a 256, and you’ve got a 512. 

And so, if you’ve got 512s and you’re putting 512s into this server right, you have six 512s, which is 3 terabytes of storage per processor.

So on a 2-socket server—2-processor server—you’re gonna actually have 6 terabytes of memory because when you’re running in memory mode, the RAM acts as cache and the PMEM acts as your RAM. So you’ve got 2 sockets, 6 terabytes of RAM.

App Direct Mode

In App Direct Mode, same kind of idea, right? You’ve got your processor, you’ve got your RAM, and then you’ve got those PMEM DIMMs. 

But what makes this different? So in App Direct Mode, rather than the PMEM operating as RAM, it operates as storage—it’s a persistent storage, right?

And so your RAM—that’s what adds up that’s your RAM—and then you can lay a namespace on top of this PMEM. You can put a filesystem on top of it, but because it’s talking back and forth through the memory bus, it’s ultra-, ultra-high performance. 

Where is this App Direct important? This is your in-memory databases, this is your big data workloads, this is where you’re really looking to take advantage of having an insanely fast connection between your storage and your processor so that you can write back and forth very easily.

So that’s kind of an overview—so you’ve got your in-memory database, like SAP HANA and your big data workloads like Hadoop.

And if you want to learn more about this go ahead and hit the links in the comments and we’ll take you through kind of an individual use, case-level description.