Micron Technology, Inc. today announced the first open-source, heterogeneous-memory storage engine (HSE), designed specifically for solid-state drives (SSDs) and storage-class memory (SCM).

Legacy storage engines born in the era of hard disk drives (HDDs) failed to architecturally provide for the increased performance and reduced latency of next-generation nonvolatile media. HSE, originally developed by Micron and now available to the open-source community, is designed for developers using all-flash infrastructure who require the benefits of open-source software, including the ability to customize or enhance code for their use cases.

“As the only company developing storage class memory, flash and DRAM technologies, Micron is uniquely positioned to build a software stack that accelerates applications running in today’s flash-based storage environments as well as storage class memory-based infrastructure of the future,” said Derek Dicker, corporate vice president and general manager of the Storage Business Unit at Micron. “We have delivered a first-of-its-kind innovation for open-source storage developers, unlocking the full potential of high-performance storage applications.”

In addition to delivering performance and endurance improvements, HSE reduces latency, especially for large-scale data sets, through intelligent data placement. Micron ssys that HSE improves throughput of particular storage applications by up to six times, reduces latency 11 times and improves SSD endurance by seven times. HSE can also take advantage of multiple classes of media concurrently, such as flash and 3D XPoint technology.

Features and Benefits of the Heterogenous-Memory Storage Engine:

• Integration with MongoDB NoSQL database delivers significant performance improvements, reduces latency and takes advantage of modern memory and storage technologies. It can also be integrated with other storage applications like NoSQL databases and object stores.
• HSE is ideal when performance at scale matters, including very large data size, large key counts (billions), high operation concurrency (thousands), or deployment of multiple classes of media.
• The platform is designed to be extensible to new interfaces and new storage devices, enabling use with a broad range of applications and solutions, including databases, internet of things (IoT), 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and object storage.
• HSE is capable of delivering additional performance for software-defined storage, such as Red Hat Ceph Storage and Scality RING, that enables cloud-native applications through containerized platforms like Red Hat OpenShift as well as tiered performance for file, block and object storage protocols for multiple use cases.
• HSE is delivered as an embeddable key-value database; Micron will maintain the code repository on GitHub.

Micron says it chose MongoDB because it is the most popular NoSQL database in the world, and the fifth most popular database overall as of April 21. In addition, MongoDB provides an open API for development and can be better optimized for SCM and SSDs.

And since Micron is focused on improving application performance in the data center, it seems obvious why the company would write this for Linux -- the preferred operating system of data centers across the globe.

To start developing, visit www.github.com/hse-project.