Viking Technology Collaborates With Supermicro

Viking Technology, a division of Sanmina Corporation, manufacturer of DRAM and SSD solutions, announced that their ArxCis-NV, a DDR3 Non-Volatile DIMM is available for integration in off-the-shelf x86 servers.

This collaboration between Super Micro Computer, Inc. and Viking Technology enables enterprise OEMs and hyperscale computing organizations to build more powerful and secure appliances for today’s data centers.

Vendor of DDR3 Non-Volatile DIMMs, Viking Technology has been instrumental in driving the eco-system to support NVDIMMs. This technology, requiring both server hardware and BIOS modifications, would historically have been used by only the top few server OEMs. Today, this technology collaboration promises to provide architectural and performance improvements to many of the applications shaping today’s IT infrastructure, including storage, server virtualization, business analytics and social media.

"This is all about I/O bandwidth and HA, both of which are crucial in a world of virtualization and the ever-growing expectations of IT," said Mark Peters, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Viking is upping the ante with its NVDIMM, which creates a new top spot as the fastest tier in a storage hierarchy. When used in conjunction with flash solid-state storage and intelligent auto-tiering or caching software, this device promises to accelerate access to data, and improve application performance."

Non-Volatile DIMMs, often termed NVDIMMs or persistent memory, are designed to deliver performance, endurance and reliability to x86 servers. Traditionally, enterprise applications could not trust main memory (DRAM) because it is volatile (loss of data upon power failure). Therefore, batteries, uninterruptable power supplies and techniques such as check-pointing were used to ensure data security, but at the cost of performance. NVDIMMs now enable server and storage arrays to utilize persistent memory that delivers both the performance and data security.

"Safeguarding cached data in the event of power failure is a mission-critical requirement," said Wally Liaw, VP international sales, Supermicro. "Working with Viking Technology, we have validated their DDR3 NVDIMMs on our SuperServer and SuperStorage product lines. With this technology, Supermicro customers have the fastest I/O performance with additional layers of protection to prevent data loss and minimize service disruptions."

"We are very excited to bring this highly anticipated technology to the mass market," said Adrian Proctor, VP marketing at Viking Technology. "The key to widespread adoption of NVDIMMs lies in the ease of system integration. Viking Technology is pleased to have collaborated with such a respected server supplier as Supermicro, which now makes this valuable technology available for any user. Being able to deliver significant performance and data security enhancements in their next product launch is a game changer for many OEMs."

NVDIMM is a memory module that resides on the DDR DRAM channel and will not lose data during power failure. It is built with both DRAM memory (volatile) and flash memory (non-volatile). Under normal operating conditions a NVDIMM operates exactly like regular DRAM modules. However, when a power failure or system crash occurs, the data movement engine transfers the contents of the DRAM into the flash for persistence and vice-versa upon power being restored.