
A target acquisition for Dell?
The title says it all.
Startup Astute Networks stores VMware virtual machines on its dedicated ViSX G3 flash SAN – leaving bulk data to be stored on standard drive arrays. Astute claims that "virtualised storage is too slow to support SAP, Oracle, and SQL databases; virtual machine performance is inadequate to meet Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint …
I'm still waiting for someone to skip Flash and build a SAN from ECC DDR RAM. I know it is a fair bit more expensive compared to NAND flash (10x) but it might be better than all this fannying about with pen*s pumps.
Call it £10 per GB and that makes 1.2TB equal £12,000. Same price as this SAN product and if you put a RAID of mechanical disks in the chassis as backup and a seriously large capacitor bank for when you want to backup the changes you'd have something lightening fast.
While we're at it, why do hard disks have such a small cache? Gimme 1-2% SDRAM cache next time please.
Jus' sayin'... ;-)