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141: GreyBeards annual 2022 wrap-up podcast

Well it has been another year and time for our annual year end wrap up. Since Covid hit, every year has certainly been interesting. This year we have seen the start of back in person conferences which was a welcome change from the covid lockdown. We are very glad to start seeing everybody again.

From the tech standpoint, the big news this year was CXL. As everyone should recall, CXL is a new-ish PCIe hardware and protocol that supports larger memory sitting out on a PCIe bus and in the future shared memory between servers. All this is to enable a new wave of memory based computing. We spent probably half our time discussing CXL and it’s impact on IT.

The other major topic was the Cloud Native ecosystem. In the past all we talked about was K8s but nowadays the ecosystem that surrounds it is almost as important as K8s itself. The final topic was a bit of a shock earlier this year and yes it was the Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Jason and I spend our Explore podcast talking about it (see our 137: VMware Explore wrap-up). Keith has high hopes that the EU will shut it down but the jury’s still out on that one. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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As for CXL, it turns out that AMD have just released full support for CXL hardware and protocols with their latest round of CPU chips. But the new AMD CPUs only support DDR5 memory, (something about there’s only so much logic one can fit on a chip…) which means all those DDR4 DIMs out in the wild need somewhere to land. CXL could supply a new lease on life for DDR4 DIMs.

And it’s not just about shared memory or increased memory sizes, CXL can also provide a tiered memory hierarchy, with gobs of flash behind memory DIMs (see: 136: FMS2022 wrap up …) So, now its no longer a TB or ten of server memory but potentially 100s of TBs. What this means for SAP HANNA, AWS Aurora and other heavy-memory solutions has yet to play out.

Cloud Native won. We see this in the increasing adoption of containers and K8s in the enterprise, cloud and just about anywhere IT happens these days. But the ecosystem surrounding K8s is chaos.

Over time, many of these ecosystem solutions will die off, be purchased, or consolidated but in the mean time, it’s entirely too confusing. Red Hat’s OpenShift is one answer and VMware’s Tanzu is another. And of course all the clouds have their own K8s packaged solution. But just to cover their bets, everyone also supports native K8s and just about every software package that works with it. So, K8s’s ecosystem is in a state of flux and may take time to become a stable set of tools useable by the enterprise IT.

Finally, Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has everyone up in arms. Customers are concerned the R&D juggernaut that VMware has been, since its very beginning, will be jettisoned in favor of profits. And HCI vendors that always felt Dell EMC had an unfair advantage will all look at Broadcom in a similar light.

Keith says there’s a major difference in how USA regulators view an acquisition and how EU regulators view one. According to Keith, EU views acquisitions in how they help or hurt the customer. USA regulators view acquisitions on show they help or hurt the competition. Will have to wait and see how this all plays for Broadcom-VMware.

On the other hand, speaking of competition, Nutanix seems to be feeling the heat as well. Rumors are it’s up for sale. Who will want it and how the regulators view both of these acquisitions may be as interesting story for 2023

2023 looks to be another year of transition for enterprise IT. The cloud players all seem to be coming around to the view that they can’t be all things to all (IT) people. And the enterprise vendors are finally seeing some modicum of staying power in the face of a relentless push to the cloud. How this plays out over the next few years will be of major interest to everybody.

Happy New Year from the GreyBeards!

Keith Townsend, The CTO Advisor

Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) is a IT thought leader who has written articles for many industry publications, interviewed many industry heavyweights, worked with Silicon Valley startups, and engineered cloud infrastructure for large government organizations. Keith is the co-founder of The CTO Advisor, blogs at Virtualized Geek, and can be found on LinkedIN.

Jason Collier, Principal Member of Technical Staff, AMD

Jason Collier (@bocanuts) is a long time friend, technical guru and innovator who has over 25 years of experience as a serial entrepreneur in technology. He was founder and CTO of Scale Computing and has been an innovator in the field of hyperconvergence and an expert in virtualization, data storage, networking, cloud computing, data centers, and edge computing for years. He’s on LinkedIN.

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136: Flash Memory Summit 2022 wrap-up with Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Assoc.

We have known Tom Coughlin (@thomascoughlin), President, Coughlin Associates for a very long time now. He’s been an industry heavyweight almost as long as Ray (maybe even longer). Tom has always been very active in storage media, storage drives, storage systems and memory as well as active in the semiconductor space. All this made him a natural to perform as Program Chair at Flash Memory Summit (FMS)2022, so it’s great to have on the show to talk about the conference.

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Just prior to the show, Micron announced that they had achieved 232 layer 3D NAND(in sampling methinks). Which would be a major step on the roadmap to higher density NAND. Micron was not at the show, but held an event at Levi stadium, not far from the conference center.

During a keynote, SK Hynix announced they had achieved 238 layer NAND, just exceeding Micron’s layer count. Other vendors at the show promised more layers as well but also discussed different ways other than layer counts to scale capacity, such as shrinking holes, moving logic, logical (more bits/cell) scaling, etc. PLC (5 bits/cell) was discussed and at least one vendor mentioned 6LC (not sure there’s a name yet but HxLC maybe?). Just about any 3D NAND is capable of logical scaling in bits/cell. So 200+ layers will mean more capacity SSDs over time.

The FMS conference seems to be expanding beyond Flash into more storage technologies as well as memory systems. In fact they had a session on DNA storage at the show.

In addition, there was a lot of talk about CXL, the new shared memory standard which supports shared memory over PCIe at FMS2022. PCIe is becoming a near universal connection protocol and is being used for 2d scaling of chips as a chip to chip interconnect as well as distributed storage and shared memory interconnect.

The CXL vision is that servers will still have DDR DRAM memory but they can share external memory systems. With shared memory systems in place memory, memory could be pooled and aggregated into one large repository which could then be carved up and parceled out to servers to support the workload dejour. And once those workloads are done, recarved up for the next workload to come. Almost like network attached storage only in this world its network attached memory.

Tom mentioned that CXL is starting to adopting other memory standers such as the Open Memory Interface (OMI) which has also been going on for a while now.

Moreover, CXL can support a memory hierarchy, which includes different speed memories such as DRAM, SCM, and SSDs. If the memory system has enough smarts to keep highly active data in the highest speed devices, an auto-tiering, shared memory pool could provide substantial capacities (10s-100sTB) of memory at a much reduced cost. This sounds a lot like what was promised by Optane.

Another topic at the show was Software Enabled/Defined Flash. There are a few enterprise storage vendors (e.g., IBM, Pure Storage and Hitachi) that design their own proprietary flash devices, but with SSD vendors coming out with software enabled flash, this should allow anyone to do something similar. Much more to come on this. Presumably, the hyper-scalers are driving this but having software enabled flash should benefit the entire IT industry.

The elephant in the room at FMS was Intel’s winding down of Optane. There were a couple of the NAND/SSD vendors talking about their “almost” storage class memory using SLC and other NAND tricks to provide Optane like performance/endurance using NAND storage.

Keith mentioned a youtube clip he saw where somebody talked about an Radeon Pro SSG ( (AMD GPU that had M.2 SSDs attached to it). And tried to show how it improved performance for some workloads (mostly 8k video using native SSG APIs). He replaced the old M.2 SSDs with newer ones with more capacity which increased the memory but it still had many inefficiencies and was much slower than HBM2 memory or VRAM. Keith thought this had some potential seeing as how in memory databases seriously increase performance but as far as I could see the SSG and it’s moded brethren died before it reached that potential.

As part of the NAND scaling discussion, Tom said one vendor (I believe Samsung) mentioned that by 2030, with die stacking and other tricks, they will be selling an SSD with 1PB of storage behind it. Can’t wait to see that.

By the way, if you are an IEEE member and are based in the USA, Tom is running for IEEE USA president this year, so please vote for him. It would be nice having a storage person in charge at IEEE.

Thomas Coughlin, President Coughlin Associates

Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates is a digital storage analyst and business and technology consultant. He has over 40 years in the data storage industry with engineering and senior management positions at several companies. Coughlin Associates consults, publishes books and market and technology reports (including The Media and Entertainment Storage Report and an Emerging Memory Report), and puts on digital storage-oriented events.

He is a regular storage and memory contributor for forbes.com and M&E organization websites. He is an IEEE Fellow, Past-President of IEEE-USA, Past Director of IEEE Region 6 and Past Chair of the Santa Clara Valley IEEE Section, Chair of the Consultants Network of Silicon Valley and is also active with SNIA and SMPTE.

For more information on Tom Coughlin and his publications and activities go to

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129: GreyBeards talk composable infrastructure with GigaIO’s, Matt Demas, Field CTO

We haven’t talked composable infrastructure in a while now but it’s been heating up lately. GigaIO has some interesting tech and I’ve been meaning to have them on the show but scheduling never seemed to work out. Finally, we managed to sync schedules and have Matt Demas, field CTO at GigaIO (@giga_io) on our show.

Also, please welcome Jason Collier (@bocanuts), a long time friend, technical guru and innovator to our show as another co-host. We used to have these crazy discussions in front of financial analysts where we disagreed completely on the direction of IT. We don’t do these anymore, probably because the complexities in this industry can be hard to grasp for some. From now on, Jason will be added to our gaggle of GreyBeard co-hosts.

GigaIO has taken a different route to composability than some other vendors we have talked with. For one, they seem inordinately focused on speed of access and reducing latencies. For another, they’re the only ones out there, to our knowledge, demonstrating how today’s technology can compose and share memory across servers, storage, GPUs and just about anything with DRAM hanging off a PCIe bus. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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GigaIO22-01-transcriptDownload

GigaIO started out with pooling/composing memory across PCIe devices. Their current solution is built around a ToR (currently Gen4) PCIe switch with logic and a party of pooling appliances (JBoG[pus], JBoF[lash], JBoM[emory],…). They use their FabreX fabric to supply rack-scale composable infrastructure that can move (attach) PCIe componentry (GPUs, FPGAs, SSDs, etc.) to any server on the fabric, to service workloads.

We spent an awful long time talking about composing memory. I didn’t think this was currently available, at least not until the next version of CXL, but Matt said GigaIO together with their partner MemVerge, are doing it today over FabreX.

We’ve talked with MemVerge before (see: 102: GreyBeards talk big memory … episode). But when last we met, MemVerge had a memory appliance that virtualized DRAM and Optane into an auto-tiering, dual tier memory. Apparently, with GigaIO’s help they can now attach a third tier of memory to any server that needs it. I asked Matt what the extended DRAM response time to memory requests were and he said ~300ns. And then he said that the next gen PCIe technology will take this down considerably.

Matt and Jason started talking about High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) which is internal to GPUs, AI boards, HPC servers and some select CPUs that stacks synch DRAM (SDRAM) into a 3D package. 2nd gen HBM silicon is capable of 256 GB/sec per package. Given this level of access and performance. Matt indicated that GigaIO is capable of sharing this memory across the fabric as well.

We then started talking about software and how users can control FabreX and their technology to compose infrastructure. Matt said GigaIO has no GUI but rather uses Redfish management, a fully RESTfull interface and API. Redfish has been around for ~6 yrs now and has become the de facto standard for management of server infrastructure. GigaIO composable infrastructure support has been natively integrated into a couple of standard cluster managers. For example. CIQ Singularity & Fuzzball, Bright Computing cluster managers and SLURM cluster scheduling. Matt also mentioned they are well plugged into OCP.

Composable infrastructure seems to have generated new interest with HPC customers that are deploying bucketfuls of expensive GPUs with their congregation of compute cores. Using GigaIO, HPC environments like these can overnight, go from maybe 30% average GPU utilization to 70%. Doing so can substantially reduce acquisition and operational costs for GPU infrastructure significantly. One would think the cloud guys might be interested as well.

Matt Demas, Field CTO, GigaIO

Matt’s career spans two decades of experience in architecting innovative IT solutions, starting with the US Air Force. He has built federal, healthcare, and education-based vertical solutions at companies like Dell, where he was a Senior Solutions Architect. Immediately prior to joining GigaIO, he served as Field CTO at Liqid. 

Matt holds a Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from American InterContinental University, and an MBA from Concordia University Austin.