Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory available first on Google Cloud

On 30th October, Google announced in a blog post the alpha availability of virtual machines with 7TB of total memory utilizing Intel Optane DC persistent memory. The partnership of Google, SAP and Intel announced in July empowers users to handle and store large amounts of data, and run in-memory databases such as SAP HANA. Now, with the availability of Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory on Google cloud, GCP customers will have the ability to scale up their workloads while benefiting from all the infrastructure capabilities and flexibility of Google Cloud.

Features of Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory

Intel Optane DC persistent memory has two special operating modes - App Direct mode and Memory mode. The  App Direct mode allows applications to receive the full value of the product’s native persistence and larger capacity. In Memory mode, applications running in a supported operating system or virtual environment can use the persistent memory as volatile memory, while utilizing an increase in system capacity made possible from module sizes up to 512 GB without rewriting software.

Unlike traditional DRAM, Intel Optane DC persistent memory offers high-capacity, affordability, and persistence. Systems deploying this technology will result in improved analytics, database and in-memory database, artificial intelligence, high-capacity virtual machines and containers, and content delivery networks. The technology reduces in-memory database restart times from days or hours to minutes or seconds and expands system memory capacity.

Google also stated that early customers have almost a 12x improvement in SAP HANA startup times using Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory.  Alibaba, Cisco, Dell EMC, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard Enterprise are some of the many companies to announced beta services and systems for early customer trials and deployments of this technology.

The search engine giant has hinted at a larger Optane-based VM offering to follow in 2019.
To know more about this news, head over to Google Cloud’s official Blog post.

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