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Dell EMC and more HPE arrays embrace storage-class memory

Soon every vendor will want to be a SCMbag

Exclusive The Register can reveal that Dell EMC is looking to add storage-class memory (SCM) and NVMe drives and fabric across its storage portfolio and that HPE's Nimble arrays will get SCM support in 2019.

At a briefing this week, Dell EMC storage product marketing manager Bob Fine told us SCM was already an incoming technology on PowerMAX, as was NVMe (both drives and fabric).

We would anticipate that both mid-range arrays, SC and Unity, will therefore have SCM support added to their operating systems, and it will happen before the end of 2019.

We were also told by a source close to HPE's Nimble product team that Nimble arrays will get SCM support in 2019, perhaps as well as NVMe-oF. Logically that fabric access would be added to 3PAR arrays too.

As we reported several days ago, HPE will add SCM caching to its 3PAR arrays.

HPE has claimed its SCM, branded as Memory-Driven Flash and based on Intel Optane 3D XPoint drives, lowers latency up to 2X and is up to 50 per cent faster than all-flash arrays, such as Dell EMC's PowerMax, with NVMe solid state drives.

The benefit of SCM in terms of significantly speeding up an array's response to IO requests should be apparent.

With HPE and Dell EMC adopting SCM for their arrays we would anticipate both IBM and NetApp adding it to their arrays as well; FlashSystem and Storwize for IBM, and AFF for NetApp. Hitachi Vantara may be on the same engineering page and we would imagine Pure Storage and Kaminario would be looking closely at SCM too.

If the enterprise storage array suppliers are looking at adding SCM technology to their arrays then it stands to reason that the enterprise server suppliers will be doing the same thing – meaning Dell EMC and HPE in the first instance, followed by Cisco, IBM, Huawei, Supermicro and others.

SCM – it's all starting to happen. ®

Bootnote

An introduction to SCM and its benefits can be found on our sister publication, Blocks & Files.

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