Mar 21, 2017 12:19 PM EDT By Natalie Scott, UniversityHerald Reporter

Optane SSD modules were first introduced by Intel last January which started off with lower storage capacity of 32GB. Larger Optane drives from 375GB to 1.5TB are reportedly on their way to boost the performance of servers and some workstations which Intel's toughest rival Seagate have failed to do.

The 32GB Optane SSD drives were first introduced in the market last January but larger capacities are reportedly on their way. According to PC World, The DC P4800X with 375GB storage will be shipped in few days while the two enterprise Optane SSDs with 750GB and 1.5TB storage capacities will be shipped in the second quarter and second half of the year, respectively.

With 3D Xpoint, the technology behind Optane SSD, Intel has able to beat its own record for fastest data center SSDs with the three-year old flash SSD DC P3700 which is now 10 times behind the new drives' performance. Aside from being an add-in PCIe card, Optane SSD could also be used for caching, long-term and short-term storage, eliminating the bottleneck of every server that pertains to storage.

Furthermore, Optane SSD has also the capability to act as a memory expansion in a server because of its hypervisor that enables the drive to mimic the DRAM as well as Memory Drives to be manufactured by Intel exclusive for Optane drives. However, this functionality will be made available to upcoming servers using Skylake-based Intel Xeon chips and will not work on AMD-based servers.

On the other hand, Optane SSD will be beneficial to applications like MySQL and Memcached which are commonly used by Google and Facebook data centers. However, Intel refuses to comment regarding Optane SSDs for workstations.

While mainstream markets are slowly shifting from HDDs to SDDs, enterprise markets are reportedly stuck with HDDs because of the costs involved, according to Market Realist. For this reason, analysts suggest that Intel Optane SSD cannot possibly unseat HDDs overnight and Intel's toughest rival Seagate is still on the right track on their plans to bump up their HDDs for the next 18 months. 

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