HPE and VMware have been delivering innovative solutions for our joint customers to further their virtualization and hybrid cloud journeys. Recently, we announced VMware Cloud Foundation support with HPE Synergy allowing customers to better build and operate their private cloud environments at scale.
Today, I am glad to welcome Bret Gibbs from HPE to share with us the joint work our engineering and product teams have been doing in enabling persistent memory architecture for customers to leverage new levels of performance for business applications.
Guest blog by Bret Gibbs, HPE Persistent Memory Product Manager
VMware announced the latest version of the industry-leading virtualization and cloud platform – vSphere 6.7 in April 2018. VMware vSphere 6.7 brings a lot of great new features and innovations but there’s one that I’m particularly excited about – vSphere Persistent Memory. What’s so exciting about persistent memory support on VMware and even more importantly, how can it help you with your business operations? Well, let’s talk about the game-changing performance that persistent memory technology brings to your virtualized data center and how your business applications and VMs use this technology for faster business operations.
First, let’s start with some of the basics. Persistent memory is the convergence of memory and storage with technology that runs on the memory bus used for very fast storage operations. How fast? This technology taps into the low nanoseconds of latency on the memory bus which can be up to 1000x faster than devices on the PCIe bus. Latency – a measurement of response time – directly impacts a technology’s ability to deliver faster performance for your business applications running on your server technology. Technology such as NVDIMM-N, which is a non-volatile DIMM combining DRAM, flash and a backup power source, allows you to address smaller storage bottlenecks in your data center that measure into the low 100s of GBs. For larger capacity needs, there’s HPE Scalable Persistent Memory which combines terabyte-scale DRAM performance combined with flash and backup power to address larger needs for things such as larger database files, faster analytics and of course faster deployment of VMs using operations such as vMotion. We have even larger capacity persistent memory on the horizon to address even larger storage bottlenecks in the future.
HPE Scalable Persistent Memory HPE NVDIMMs
The software ecosystem is equally as important as the hardware when it comes to bringing new levels of performance to your business applications. HPE and VMware have partnered together over the last few years to fine tune the deployment of this technology to the virtualized data center. vSphere 6.7 presents the Persistent Memory through the hypervisor seamlessly with little overhead and presents virtualized persistent memory to be used by your VMs resulting in faster application performance. In the diagram below, we see how two different virtual machines running different OS can leverage persistent memory without any changes made to the OS or the application.
HPE and VMware are working together on software application demos to show how VMware virtualized data centers running on HPE technology tap into the same levels of performance as bare metal deployments. In particular, databases, analytics and virtualized data center functions such as vMotion can realize great performance benefits from this technology. Take a sneak preview of one of the newest demos we developed to highlight the tremendous benefits of this technology on a virtualized Oracle database with vSphere 6.7, delivering 2.3M IOPS, 30GB of bandwidth and virtually no latency. Yes, that’s right. No latency! Check out the demo.
Additionally, HPE and VMware have worked closely together on several other demos listed here:
- SQL Tail of the Log running on vSphere that shows up to 3x higher performance with 1/3 the latency and up to 8x higher performance in sequential concurrent writes compared to SSDs and NVMe SSD respectively:
- Redis in-memory database demo running on VMware that shows an analytics use case of ingesting a tweet stream with HPE Scalable PMEM analyzing up to 6x more data within the same timeframe and near instant database restart:
We will showcase additional new demos that we are working on together around HPE Discover Las Vegas June 2018 timeframe! Stay tuned!
HPE and VMware will continue to work together to guide you on how to deploy and take advantage of new innovations like persistent memory technology in your virtualized data center. Innovation is in our DNA and we are always looking for ways to improve our offerings to help you with your business operations. Come see us at HPE Discover Las Vegas from June 19-21 at the Sands Convention Center and hear directly from the experts on HPE Persistent Memory technology and VMware vSphere. HPE is the #1 global leader in server virtualization solutions based on VMware technology and we will continue to work together to bring meaningful innovation to your virtualized data center.”
Thanks Bret for the post! Refer to the VMware and HPE Alliances page for more details on all our joint solutions. Follow me @bhumikp
