Samsung says memory ‘dynamic duo’ critical for today’s data centers

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Samsung Electronics, the largest producer of DRAM and solid state drives (SSDs) in the world, today announced that the ‘dynamic duo’ of server power savings: Samsung’s DDR3 memory chips and SSDs, has the potential to sharply reduce data center costs.

DDR3, which can be specified at 1.35Volts, and enterprise SSDs, which can be installed in arrays of servers as a replacement for far less-efficient hard disk drives, have the combined potential to save over 10 percent of power usage per server, and sometimes even more.

“With anywhere from dozens to thousands of servers in any given data center, the potential for substantial cost savings with DDR3 and SSDs is enormous,” said Jim Elliott, vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.

“Blending the exceptionally low power of today’s DRAM with performance optimized, high capacity enterprise SSDs provides data center managers with a solid alternative to slower, high-voltage DRAM and hard disk drives,” he added.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the need for reducing energy consumption in servers will reach critical proportions over the next three years as consumption is expected to reach 120 billion kilowatts a year by 2011. To reduce this significantly, data center managers must adopt newer technologies that provide substantial energy savings and greater performance efficiencies.

Samsung said the use of higher density, low-voltage DDR3 as a replacement for its long-running DDR2 predecessor, can save over 70 percent in reduced power consumption, through lower voltage requirements and the use of more energy-efficient 40nm class process technology.

In a data center environment, SSDs provide a compelling value when the total cost of ownership is considered, including hardware cost, maintenance, repairs and reduced electricity bills. A single SSD can realize up to 70 percent in power savings.

Samsung Enterprise SSDs can process as much as 100 times the number of IOPs (input/outputs per second) per watt as a 15K rpm 2.5-inch SAS HDD with a very low heat load on data center air conditioning. The IOPs-based performance of one SSD can equal up to 40 hard disk drives.

“The combination of Samsung’s DDR3 and SSDs in new server architectures will provide more powerful green IT solutions and help immensely in putting the brakes on unnecessary energy drain. This has already been proven by server OEMs that have adopted our 50nm class process DRAM,” Elliott added.

DDR3 and SSDs deliver more than energy-savings. DDR3 effectively doubles the performance level of its predecessor, DDR2, with speeds of up to 1333 megabits (mbps) per second. Samsung’s 100 gigabyte (GB) SSD reads data sequentially at 230 megabytes per second (MB/s) and writes it sequentially at 180 MB/s.

With module densities ranging from 2GBs to 16GBs (and soon 32GBs), Samsung’s DDR3 enables OEMs to more easily design servers that use up to 192GBs of memory per system (16GBx12), considerably more than traditional server configurations. With virtualization requiring higher density memory, Samsung’s memory solutions become all the more attractive.

In addition to virtualization, Samsung’s “dynamic duo” will benefit a wide range of other data center storage applications such as video on demand, web serving and secure online transaction processing.