Connections

Dell EMC, Western Digital Help Launch Interconnect Group

Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Western Digital and IBM are among members of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) that have banded together to form the Gen-Z Consortium, a new group of technology companies with the goal of creating a new, scalable computing interconnect and protocol.

The high-performance “fabric” technology would aim to at simplify data access at rack scale, creating a peer-to-peer interconnect, that can quickly access large volumes of data, all while lowering costs.

“As data volumes continue to grow and the time to result of analytics become increasingly critical to our customer’s business, we need new architectures and technologies that can effectively process the information,” said Mark Potter, SVP and CTO for Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Enterprise Group. “HPE is committed to supporting open standards and working collaboratively to develop this new memory semantic fabric that meets the demands of the modern data center.”

John Roese, EVP and CTO for Dell EMC’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, added: “As the industry moves toward the third platform new open innovations are required to enable infrastructure support of massive data, billions of IoT devices, and cloud native applications.

“Taking advantage of new storage class memories and enabling composability in a memory centric way will be critical as the control plane shifts toward memory computing. Gen-Z is an open industry standard that enables these innovations. Dell EMC is excited to be part of the Consortium that is developing this ground breaking open industry standard,” he said.

Other alliance members include AMD, ARM, Cavium Inc., Cray, IDT, Lenovo, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, Microsemi, Red Hat, Samsung, Seagate, SK hynix, Western Digital Corporation and Xilinx.

The Gen-Z group promises a simplified interface, based on memory semantics, one that promises to be scalable from tens to several hundred GBs of bandwidth, and will aim to enable data-centric computing, with scalable memory pools for real-time analytics and in-memory applications.

The standards body will be open and non-proprietary, with the Gen-Z core spec (covering architecture and protocol) being finalized later this year.

“Huawei is committed to supporting development of industry open standards to explore IT system innovation and meet our customers’ needs on real-time and huge-volume data processing in big data era,” said Zheng Yelai, president of Huawei’s IT Product Line. ”Gen-Z is an open standard developed for high performance, and highly scalable memory system interconnect to enable flexible workloads support on big data analytics, and new technologies support such as storage class memory and memory centric computing.”