Gen-Z consortium: Together to develop high performance fabric read more at here www.spinonews.com/index.php/item/1257-gen-z-consortium-together-to-develop-high-performance-fabric

A group of leading companies has formed an alliance with the aim of creating and commercializing a new scalable computing interconnect and protocol.

The alliance members include AMD, ARM, Cavium Inc., Cray, Dell, EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Huawei, IBM, IDT, Lenovo, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, Microsemi, Red Hat, Samsung, Seagate, SK Hynix, Western Digital Corporation, and Xilinx.

The Gen-Z Consortium was put together to develop the new high-performance fabric because existing technologies are based on the assumption that storage is slow, persistent and reliable, while data in memory is fast, but volatile.

Hence, the increasingly low cost and, adoption of SSD storage, which offers 10 times the performance of conventional hard-disk storage, has busted that consensus.

The new storage-class memory technologies emerge that drive the convergence of storage and memory attributes, the programmatic and architectural assumptions that have worked in the past are no longer optimal.

The challenges associated with explosive data growth, real-time application demands, the emergence of low-latency storage-class memory, and demand for rack-scale resource pools require a new approach to data access.

These claims the consortium, will enable data-centric computing with scalable memory pools and resources for real-time analytics and in-memory applications. It says that it will be highly software compatible and will require no changes to operating systems, although that remains to be seen.

The organization will publish a core specification, covering the architecture and protocol, by the end of the year.