Micron Technology has launched the Micron 5200 series of SATA solid state drives (SSD). Built on Micron's new 64-layer 3D NAND technology, the Micron 5200 series of SSDs offers a SATA platform for virtualized workloads. The Micron 5200 series is engineered to deliver an enterprise storage solution to replace existing hard drives and legacy SSDs. Micron 5200 SSDs deliver better total cost of ownership and improve data center efficiency through server and storage platform consolidation, reducing IT costs and simplifying infrastructure and maintenance, Micron said. Micron 5200 SSDs are available now for OEM qualification and for purchase through distributors, such as ASI, Avnet, CDW, Ingram, Microland, WPG-Americas, Synnex and others.

Micron Technology's new 32GB NVDIMM-N offers twice the capacity of existing NVDIMMs, providing system designers with new flexibility to work with larger data sets in fast persistent memory. According to the vendor, the solution is designed to support the increasing performance, energy efficiency and uptime requirements of data analytics and online transaction processing applications. Compared to server configurations using traditional far storage, deploying NVDIMMs can deliver up to 400% performance benefits, Micron claimed.The new innovation in persistent memory offers a solution for near-memory data analysis and addresses rising bandwidth demands of data-rich applications in markets such as finance, medicine, retail, and oil and gas exploration. VMware and Dell are collaborating with Micron to increase the performance for virtualized applications. With virtual persistent memory, customers can now run multiple operating systems in a virtualized environment while reducing overall network traffic.

Intel and Micron have jointly announced the availability of their 3D NAND technology. This new 3D NAND technology, jointly developed by the companies, stacks layers of data storage cells vertically to create storage devices with three times higher capacity than competing NAND technologies, according to the companies. Intel and Micron chose to use a floating gate cell. This is the first use of a floating gate cell in 3D NAND, which was a key design choice to enable greater performance and increase quality and reliability. The new 3D NAND technology stacks flash cells vertically in 32 layers to achieve 256Gb multilevel cell (MLC) and 384Gb triple-level cell (TLC) die that fit within a standard package. These capacities can enable gum stick-sized SSDs with more than 3.5TB of storage and standard 2.5-inch SSDs with greater than 10TB. Because capacity is achieved by stacking cells vertically, the individual cell dimensions can be considerably larger, the companies indicated. The 256Gb MLC version of 3D NAND is sampling with select partners, and the 384Gb TLC design will be sampling later in spring 2015. The fab production line has already begun initial runs, and both devices will be in full production by the fourth quarter of 2015.