What is pricing for NVDIMMs?
Please contact your local sales or distribution contact for pricing guidance. Visit the How To Buy page for assistance in locating an authorized distributor or Micron sales representative.
What advantages does Micron offer over the competition?
Micron is the only supplier with the advantages of scale and stability. Micron produces DRAM, NAND, and NOR products, all which are used on the NVDIMM.
What is Micron’s relationship with AgigA Tech?
Micron has teamed up with AgigA Tech to co-develop several versions of NVDIMMs. Micron will manufacture the NVDIMM and rely on AgigA Tech to provide the PowerGem® ultracapacitor (or ultracap) modules that supply power to the NVDIMM during a power-fail event.
Are there any special design requirements for NVDIMMs?
NVDIMMs are designed to integrate easily into the DIMM slots of industry-standard server and storage platforms. The Save function can be initiated in several ways; to initiate a Save by the defined ADR pin, the NVDIMM must be paired with a motherboard that supports this hardware function.
What are the target applications?
Storage tiering, cache for RAID systems, system checkpointing, full system persistence, data logging, de-duplication, and fast access to metadata.
What densities will Micron offer?
Initial offerings are 4GB/8GB (DRAM/NAND) and 8GB/16GB (DRAM/NAND). 16GB of DRAM with 32GB of NAND is planned for later in 2013.
What is NVDIMM technology?
A nonvolatile DIMM (NVDIMM) is a type of hybrid module that merges NAND Flash, DRAM, and an ultracapacitor (also called ultracap or supercapacitor) power source into a highly reliable nonvolatile memory system. NVDIMMs can be used in the main memory slots of servers to perform workloads at DRAM speeds, yet in the event of a power failure or system crash, the data in the NVDIMM is securely preserved in the NAND and is available almost immediately upon power restoration to the host system.
What is the advantage of using an ultracapacitor over a traditional power source?
Ultracapacitors (also known as ultracaps or supercapacitors) store electricity by physically separating positive and negative charges—unlike batteries, which do so chemically. Because ultracapacitors do not rely on a chemical reaction, they can operate in a wide variety of conditions. Also, whereas batteries start to lose their ability to hold a charge after a year or two (several hundred charge/discharge cycles), ultracapacitors have hundreds of thousands of charge/discharge cycles, which greatly extends their life compared to a battery. Unlike many batteries, ultracapacitors do not contain lead and do not have leaking problems.
What is the specific value these NVDIMM products deliver?
NVDIMM technology provides performance, cost, and data-security advantages by:
- Eliminating the need to create a separate memory subsystem for emergency cache backup
- Increasing the application speeds
- Reducing access to storage that is slower than DRAM speeds; for example, SSDs or hard drives
- Eliminating the need for batteries by using a more cost-effective and power-efficient ultracapacitor (ultracap)
- Provides persistence to server RAID storage, storage cache tiering, data logging, de-duplication, system/application checkpoints, and metadata storage
- NVDIMMs fill a hole in the storage continuum between DRAM modules and PCI SSD. NVDIMMs provide significant performance at a favorable cost/bit compared to other technologies.