Performance with Samsung LRDIMMs and Inphi’s iMB technology

Performance with Samsung LRDIMMs and Inphi's iMB technology

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What do you do when you need more memory but all of your server’s system memory slots are full and a new server isn’t in your budget? You can increase your available memory with high-speed Samsung Load-Reduced Dual Inline Memory Modules, or LRDIMMs, using Inphi’s Isolation Memory Buffer (iMB™) technology. iMB-enabled Samsung LRDIMMs can provide twice the memory in a given amount of space by allowing you to fill all memory slots with quad-ranked DIMMs.

In our labs, Principled Technologies benchmarked an IBM® System x3750 M4, a server based on the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-4600 product family, targeted at end-user applications such as ecommerce servers as well as high-performance compute systems that could benefit from the additional cores and system memory available in a four-socket system compared to traditional two-socket systems. We set up the System x3750 M4 with 384 gigabytes (GB) of standard system memory, or RDIMMs, to determine how much overall application performance it delivered and how adding virtual machines (VMs) affected performance with standard RDIMMs.

Then we replaced the standard system memory DIMMs with the iMB-enabled Samsung LRDIMMs that use Samsung memory and Inphi’s iMB component, giving us 768 gigabytes (GB) of system memory using the same number of memory slots.

We measured the application performance of the two configurations using a tool that simulates a real-world ecommerce workload. With the LRDIMMs, the server could support twice as much memory and deliver more than twice as many orders per minute (OPM) at 10 VMs. As we added more VMs, performance increased, rather than decreased as it did with the RDIMM configuration, because each VM had a large amount of system memory driving performance. At 12 VMs, the iMB-enabled Samsung LRDIMM configuration delivered 148.1 percent greater performance than the RDIMM configuration provided at 10 VMs. This boost means more capacity and room for your business to grow.■