Why not buy a 32TB SPARC server, then you have all the RAM you need. Next year the SPARC M7 will be 64TB RAM. :)
Hey - who wants 4.8 terabyte almost as fast as memory?
Chinese flash product supplier Memblaze has launched an almost memory-speed server flash card with a 14 microsecond latency - and up to 4.8TB capacity - for the hyperscale market and open compute project applications, according to a company statement. This is a variant of its existing PBlaze3 card. Speeds and feeds: 750,000 …
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Thursday 30th October 2014 11:49 GMT MadMike
If we talk about TB sized RAM caches, what is better than real RAM (which is faster) and more of it than 4TB cache?
"Put up with SPARC"? The SPARC M7 server released next year, will be at least twice as fast as anything else if we talk about cpu power. And 64TB RAM can store lot of data, so you dont have to go out to disk - which makes the M7 server even faster. A single cpu can make 120GB/sec SQL queries. Worlds fastest server it will be.
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Thursday 30th October 2014 12:54 GMT Roo
"If we talk about TB sized RAM caches, what is better than real RAM (which is faster) and more of it than 4TB cache?"
I'm sure people would talk about TB sized RAM caches if they had an application for them...
OTOH there seems to be a lot of people who want to store lots of data and not pay the seek penalty, which is precisely what this card does...
You are making the M7 vaporware look like a solution looking for a problem by trying to scare people off buying a PCI Express card in favour of a few tons of vaporware.
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Friday 31st October 2014 18:19 GMT Roo
"Do you call SPARC M7 vaporware?"
Until it's shipping and Oracle have deigned to publish CINT & CFP for it, I call it vaporware because it is vaporware.
"Well, the M6 server today has 32TB RAM. The largest on the market, by far. The competitors largest servers has half of the memory, and half the number of sockets."
On the other hand you can fit several of these flash cards into a Xeon, for a fraction of the power budget, cost and space, which is handy if you are running a crowded datacentre... Oh and the card would add NON VOLATILE memory, which solves a lot of real problems that folks have right now. Of course the card may suck, and it is also vaporware (like the M7) until it's shipping...
Who knows maybe the lead time will be so huge that the customers will have chosen to spunk $M on M6 & M7s instead of a $K on a few cards. Seems unlikely to me, given that they can slot in FLASH memory cards from other vendors into their Xeons and use several of them if they need more density (system bandwidth constraints are likely to bite)... ;)
I would love the M7 to be a great product, but in my view, given the history of SPARC, the M7 won't be good enough bring in new customers. In other news I've seen some cute figures for unoptimised tight loops running on a POWER8, I think John Cocke would be very proud.
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Thursday 30th October 2014 03:57 GMT razorfishsl
Dolphin stolen from SQL, non existent product only computer renderings
Website that shoots content faster than you can read….
"Pianokey-Technology" ( everyone else calls then card slots) "is a unique capacity expansion technology owned by Memblaze, which is applied for PBlaze3 Flash Accelerator. Its design idea is derived from the chord of piano"
What could possibly go wrong…….
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Tuesday 4th November 2014 11:16 GMT Bruce Hockin
Suggest you try one and find out
Some comfort for the skeptic. A partner of mine has tested it recently (in the UK) and he concluded, I paraphrase "it took a while to warm up, but when it did it was as fast as anything else we've ever tested... and given the price it's a bit of a no-brainer"
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Thursday 30th October 2014 06:44 GMT John Savard
Latency
A 14 microsecond latency isn't really "as fast as RAM", but a bandwidth comparable to that of RAM is, I presume, significantly faster than that of ordinary flash memory. Which means that while the design is suited to hard drive substitutes, we'll need a new kind of port on our computers before thumb drives start doing this.
Is this level of improvement in conventional flash memory likely to make HP's memristor project irrelevant? I hope not, because it promises more than what a faster flash drive can deliver, but this level of progress in flash drives may reduce HP's chances of getting the initial market it needs.
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Thursday 30th October 2014 12:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re. Flash
I heard rumblings a while back about HAFR (Heat Assisted Flash Recording) to overcome the write limit in TLC flash.
The idea is that when the chip uses up too many spare blocks it activates a heater and applies about 75C to the chip stack from both sides (top and bottom) while writing 111's to all cells which then undoes the damage to the silicon.
This is actually feasible, tried it myself on "dead" chips and it did indeed bring them back to life.
Also feasible is 7KeV X-ray irradiation of the chips to anneal them, this is done in .mil systems or so I hear.
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Friday 31st October 2014 19:13 GMT Henry Wertz 1
Re: Re. Flash
"The idea is that when the chip uses up too many spare blocks it activates a heater and applies about 75C to the chip stack from both sides"...
So, when I get some SSD storage can I just wedge it up between the video card and CPU, and either turn down the fan speed or plug up the heat sinks with a bit of dust? Done. 8-)
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
