Digital transformation is driving applications to process more data in memory and in real time. Lack of Infrastructure technologies to support such environments is pushing customers to either over-provision expensive hardware or deploy complex solutions. Enterprises and cloud providers are looking to provide more flexibility and improve efficiencies for their customers, all without requiring huge lift in costs, hardware infrastructure or applications. In this talk, we showcase VMware Software Memory Tiering including near term trends like CXL, PCIGen5, for memory disaggregation.

Persistent scripting brings the benefits of persistent memory programming to high-level interpreted languages. More importantly, it brings the convenience and programmer productivity of scripting to persistent memory programming. We have integrated a novel generic persistent memory allocator into a popular scripting language interpreter, which now exposes a simple and intuitive persistence interface: A flag notifies the interpreter that a script’s variables reside in a persistent heap in a specified file.

Emerging memory technologies have gotten a couple of big boosts over the past few years, one in the form of Intel’s Optane products, and the other from the migration of CMOS logic to nodes that NOR flash, and now SRAM, cannot practically support. Although these appear to be two very different spheres, a lot of the work that has been undertaken to support Intel’s Optane products (also known as 3D XPoint) will lead to improved use of persistent memories on processors of all kinds: “xPUs”.

Most programs have traditionally been divisible into either "in-memory" or "database" applications. When writing in-memory applications, all that matters for speed is the efficiency of the algorithms and data structures in the CPU/memory system during the run of the program, whereas with database applications the main determinant of speed is the number and pattern of accesses to storage (e.g., random accesses vs. sequential ones).

Data persistence on CXL is an essential enabler toward the goal of instant-on processing. DRAM class performance combined with non-volatility on CXL enables a new class of computing architectures that can exploit these features and solve real-world bottlenecks for system performance, data reliability, and recovery from power failures. New authentication methods also enhance the security of server data in a world of cyberattacks.