Executive Summary
With the advancement of digital transformation in China, most Chinese enterprises have chosen to migrate to the cloud. Digital transformation enables continuous business growth and helps enterprises maintain sustainable development. However, the rapid development of digital technology has also increased the IT budget of enterprises, putting them under pressure to cut costs while improving efficiency.
For example, in the enterprise cloud transformation journey, business lines are getting increasingly complex and data volume is growing rapidly. This puts higher requirements for data storage capacity, real-time response to data, and system stability. In previous solutions, the hot or active data are stored in the memory for guaranteed performance, but the price per GB of DRAM remains high, resulting in high DRAM costs, and existing DRAM DIMM densities also restrict the physical capacity of system memory. As a result, it is difficult for companies to store all hot data to the memory.
For warm data stored in the storage, in some nearline storage scenarios, the growing demand for low latency exceeds the limit of NAND SSDs because the performance and durability of NAND media are inadequate.
To cater to the demand for cost-effective, high-performance solutions, Alibaba Cloud chooses to bring the persistent memory technology to the cloud and integrate Alibaba Cloud's X-Dragon architecture and Intel® Optane™ persistent memory to build persistent memory products (ecs.i4p and ecs.re7p) in the cloud.