San Francisco, Calif. — Samsung Electronics claims its DDR memory chips and solid-state drives (SSDs) have the potential to significantly lower server power consumption and reduce data center costs. The two technologies have the combined potential to save more than 10 percent of power usage per server, said Samsung.
This “dynamic duo” will benefit a wide range of data-center storage applications including virtualization, video on demand, web serving and secure online transaction processing, said the leading supplier of DRAMs and SSDs.
“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., in a statement. “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.
The need to reduce energy consumption in servers will be critical over the next three years as consumption is projected to reach 120 billion kilowatts per year by 201l, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). As a result, data center managers will need to adopt newer technologies that provide substantial energy savings and greater performance efficiencies, said Samsung.
Currently, the EPA is working on enterprise server and data-center energy efficiency initiatives that will help establish Energy Star ratings for these applications.
Samsung said the use of higher density, low-voltage DDR3 as a replacement for its DDR2 predecessor, can save over 70 percent in reduced power consumption, through lower voltage requirements and the use of more energy-efficient 40-nm class process technology.
Similarly, a single SSD can realize up to 70 percent in power savings, said Samsung. The company says its enterprise SSDs can process as much as 100 times the number of input/outputs per second (IOPs) per watt as a 15K rpm 2.5-inch SAS hard-disk drive (HDD) with a very low heat load on data center air conditioning. The IOPs-based performance of one SSD can equal up to 40 HDDs.
Samsung said DDR3 effectively doubles the performance level of its predecessor, DDR2, with speeds of up to 1333 megabits (Mbits/s) per second, while the 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 2 GB to 16GB, and soon to be released 32 GB, Samsung’s DDR3 enables OEMs to more easily design servers that use up to 192 GBs of memory per system (16GBx12), which is considerably more than traditional server configurations, said the company.