Paper Title: Boost Application Performance with Persistent Memory Region (PMR) Technology

Paper Abstract: How do you give your in-memory database a performance kick without increasing system memory? You need more persistent memory! Persistent memory in a server is byte-accessible memory that preserves data in the event of a power loss. Today, this capability is delivered with Non-Volatile DIMMs (NV-DIMMS) which are flash DRAM modules with battery back-up. Unfortunately NV-DIMMs are expensive and use valuable DIMM sockets. However, there is an alternative: an NVMe SSD with a Persistent Memory Region (PMR). It presents both a PMR for fast non-volatile MMIO byte access, and block-based storage on the same PCIe bus to the host while using only a single SSD socket! The additional functionality enables the host to improve system performance by moving some metadata operations, such as logging, journaling and application staging, to the NV-RAM within a NVMe SSD, thereby helping to improve overall application performance. The PMR feature in the NVMe specification enables the ecosystem and facilitates broader adoption of this new value-add feature.

Paper Author: Chander Chadha, Sr Product Marketing Manager, Toshiba

Author Bio: Chander Chadha is Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager for Toshiba for Enterprise and DataCenter SSD product lines. In his current role, he defines SSD products to meet advanced enterprise/data center and software defined storage (SDS) requirements. Before Toshiba, he worked for ST Micro, Link-a-Media, SanDisk, SandForce/LSI and Seagate on their HDD/SSD controllers and SSD products for Client, Enterprise and Data Center markets, which has sold multi-millions units of controllers and SSDs. Chander is also active participant in storage ecosystem forums to enable NVMe SSDs adoption, and has been a presenter and panelist on Flash Memory Summit and SNIA forums. Chander holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from CR State College of Engineering, India, VLSI technology IIT Delhi, India and MBA from University of California, Irvine.