Intel has introduced its first Optane 3D XPoint product, the Intel SSD DC P4800X hard drive, which the company says can perform database operations up to 10 times faster.
The first Optane (Intel SSD DC P4800X) will be available today in 375GB, and in the second half of 2017 it will be released in 750GB, 1.5TB and as U.2.
In addition to the SSD's speed, which the company said responds 8 to 40 times faster than the P3700 SSD DC, Intel says it can also be used for memory expansion.
Combined with the Memory Drive found in Xeon chips, an Optane SSD can be used as a memory pool along with DRAM without having to configure your operating system or use any application.
The company even says that during workloads, it believes as much as 90% of DRAM can be replaced by the Optane SSD.
In one example, the company used a dual-Xeon server with 678GB of RAM running a 675GB MySQL database. The company upgraded the RAM to 128GB and added two 375GB Intel SSD DC P4800X drives. Immediately afterward, the database performance dropped by about 20 percent.
With the larger capacity of Optane, a dual-socket Xeon system could have 24 TB of memory, and a quad-socket system would reach 48 TB.
Intel announced that Optane 3D will be particularly useful for analytics, machine learning, and databases.
