The new ProLiant Gen9 models that Hewlett Packard Enterprise is launching this morning aren’t like most other servers. Instead of just including a few traditional DRAM cards under the hood, the vendor has decided to add the option of fitting the motherboard with a novel type of memory that is described as both faster and considerably more reliable.

Known by the acronym NVDIMM, the technology was developed by a low-profile semiconductor company called Netlist Inc. nearly a decade ago to make it easier for organizations to meet their fast-evolving operational requirements. HPE and a number of top chip makers including Micron Technology Inc. have since created their own flavors that pair DRAM with high-speed flash storage on an integrated card sporting a built-in battery. The unit packs just enough juice to support a tiny processor that can detect when the host server experiences an outage and quickly move any data left in its memory over to the flash component, which is able to retain the information even after the power is cut completely.

HPE moved off the beaten track with its variation and decided to implement the battery separately from the memory in a configuration that is able to support as many as 16 NVDIMM cards. The company also provides organizations with the option to make some of the on-board flash storage available to the applications running on top of their ProLiant Gen9 servers, which is where the technology’s performance-boosting quality comes into play. The fact that the solid-state memory is attached directly to the motherboard in close proximity to the CPUs makes it possible to access the data inside much faster than traditional SSDs mounted at the back of a machine allow. 

Tim Peters, the head of HPE’s server business, told the WSJ in an interview that his company’s NVDIMM flavor is thereby able to decrease latency by up to 81 times for certain workloads. In practice, that means a SQL Server deployment can potentially run twice as fast than on a traditional SSD-based server, while replication is performed 400 percent more efficiently. The speed improvement increases even further when taking into account the contribution of the latest-generation Intel Xeon E5-2600 v4 chips that ship with the new ProLiant 9 machines.

HP claims that the processor series can carry out some operations up to 25 percent quicker than its predecessor thanks to 22 on-board cores and improved support for virtualization software. The new chips and memory cards are topped off by the inclusion of a specialized microcontroller that checks whether the componentry has been tempered before allowing a server to boot. 

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