Sun and Samsung develop extended life flash chip | | 2008-07-17 | | Sun and Samsung have jointly developed a single level cell flash memory for servers that has a 500 percent increase in write cycles.
The extended life NAND chips will be packaged as solid state drives (SSDs) for servers, but are capable of being used in storage arrays as well. Sun said it plans to incorporate the technology into its line of servers and storage products.
Sun’s lead technologist for flash memory, Michael Cornwell said: "Sun sees incredible upside to using server-grade SLC NAND flash to accelerate customers’ applications, and we plan to incorporate this technology into our line of servers and storage. Flash SSDs of this quality and performance when included in our systems and Open Storage products with Solaris ZFS will revolutionize the hardware marketplace. We are excited to be working closely with Samsung to lead this game-changing technology revolution."
Sun is promoting flash memory as a server system software acceleration cache, allowing software to store and access working data much faster than when using hard disk drives. The extended-life flash, Sun and Samsung say, is expected to deliver the highest endurance ever offered in 24/7 mission-critical computing.
Samsung claim the chip will provide a 100X increase over conventional hard disk drives in the number of data transfers (input/output per second) per watt, offering dramatic power savings.
Probable applications for the new extended-life flash include video streaming, high-transaction data processing, search engine operations and other high-speed server functions.
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