Intel Rolls Out First Optane SSD

03rd April 2017

Intel has rolled out the first generation of its long-promised Optane SSDs for the Enterprise. As the first product to combine the attributes of memory and storage, the new Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Series will drive new solutions with applications such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, faster trading, deeper insights into medical scans, and expands the reach of cloud computing solutions.

The DC P4800X accelerates applications for fast caching and fast storage to increase scale per server and reduce transaction costs for latency sensitive workloads. In addition, the DC P4800X enables data centers to deploy bigger and more affordable datasets to gain new insights from large memory pools. With 5-8x faster performance at low queue depth workloads, the SSD delivers high throughput for single accesses and super low latency. Where NAND-based SSDs are often measured at a queue depth of 32 (SATA) or 128 (NVMe*) in order to showcase maximum throughput, the DC P4800X can reach as much as 500,000 IOPS, or ~2GB/s, at a queue depth of 11.1 This new technology is perfectly suited to accelerate enterprise applications to new, breakthrough levels of performance.

According to Intel, the new data storage tier created by Intel Optane technology enables significantly improved response times under most workloads. With NAND-based SSDs, random write operations require an immense amount of background media management. These tasks can add significant delay to the read operations. The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X maintains consistent read response times regardless of the write throughput applied to the drive. Read response times remain below <30μs while withstanding up to 2GB/s of random write pressure.