Open-source storage engine for SSDs and storage class memory

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The first open-source, heterogeneous-memory storage engine (HSE), designed specifically for solid-state drives (SSDs) and storage-class memory (SCM) has been unveiled by Micron Technology.

HSE, which was originally developed by Micron and is now available to the open-source community, is intended for developers using all-flash infrastructure who are looking to benefit from open-source software to customise or enhance code for unique use cases.

“As the only company developing storage class memory, flash and DRAM technologies, Micron is uniquely positioned to build a software stack that accelerates applications running in today’s flash-based storage environments as well as future storage class memory-based infrastructure,” said Derek Dicker, corporate vice president and general manager of the Storage Business Unit at Micron. “We have delivered a first-of-its-kind innovation for open-source storage developers, unlocking the full potential of high-performance storage applications.”

In addition to delivering improved levels of performance and endurance, HSE reduces latency, especially for large-scale data sets, through intelligent data placement. HSE improves throughput of particular storage applications by up to six times, has been found to reduce latency 11 times and improves SSD endurance by seven times.

HSE can also take advantage of multiple classes of media concurrently, such as flash and 3D XPoint technology. According to the company, when a Micron X100 NVMe SSD is added to a set of four Micron 5210 QLC SSDs, throughput more than doubles and read latency improves nearly four times.

“We see enormous potential in the technologies being introduced by Micron, especially as it takes an innovative approach in lowering the latency between compute, memory and storage resources,” said Stefanie Chiras, vice president and general manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux at Red Hat. “We look forward to working with Micron in the open-source community to further build out these innovations, ultimately bringing new choices to the storage world derived from open standards and concepts.”

Features and Benefits of the Heterogenous-Memory Storage Engine:

  • Integration with MongoDB, the world’s most popular NoSQL database, delivers significant performance improvements, reduces latency and takes full advantage of modern memory and storage technologies. It can also be integrated with other storage applications like NoSQL databases and object stores.
  • HSE is suitable for when performance at scale is required, including very large data size, large key counts (billions), high operation concurrency (thousands), or deployment of multiple classes of media.
  • The platform is designed to be extensible to new interfaces and new storage devices, enabling use with a broad range of applications and solutions, including databases, internet of things (IoT), 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and object storage.
  • HSE is capable of delivering additional performance for software-defined storage, such as Red Hat Ceph Storage and Scality RING, that enables cloud-native applications through containerized platforms like Red Hat OpenShift as well as tiered performance for file, block and object storage protocols for multiple use cases.
  • HSE is delivered as an embeddable key-value database; Micron will maintain the code repository on GitHub.