We are building a series of prototype storage systems based to explore the future of fast storage. The first is a PCIe-attached storage array called Moneta. Moneta comprises 64GB of emulated PCM storage and a carefully designed hardware/software interface that makes issuing and completing extremely fast. The hardware and software optimizations in the Moneta system increase performance for small, random accesses by 18x and reduces software overheads by 60%. Moneta array sustain 2.8 GB/s for sequential transfers and 541K random 4 KB IO operations per second (8x higher than a state-of-the-art flash-based SSD). Moneta can perform a 512-byte write in 9 us (5.6x faster than the SSD). It is one of the fastest solid state storage arrays in the world, and we are working to make it even faster.

Onyx, our second storage array prototype, is one of the world's first PCM-based SSDs. It uses much of Moneta's infrastructure but replaces the DRAM DIMMs with our own, custom PCM memory modules. Even though it uses first-generation phase-change memory devices, it can still sustain over 1.1GB/s for reads. Writes are a good bit slower, but our plan is to upgrade Onyx soon to use newer, denser, faster PCM devices.

Moneta and Onyx let us understand the impact of extremely fast solid-state storage on systems and applications. Our work has already demonstrated that conventional operating and file systems as well as legacy applications will need significant refinement in order to take full use of these systems. As Moneta and Onyx evolve it will also pave the way for new storage applications that are only possible when storage is 1,000s of times faster than disk.