They kept that quiet: Toshiba unsheathes FlashBlade rival

Out of the blue Toshiba has launched an Atom-powered real-time, scale-out, compute-plus-flash analytics engine that is set to compete with Pure’s FlashBlade product. This announcement unveils the first real competition for Pure Storage's Big Data analytics box and comes from a most unlikely and surprising source, Toshiba not …

[casaloco]

Obvious but...

Pics, or it didn't happen.

[kmac499]

So how much of a 'No man's Sky'-verse will fit in one of these then ???

[Nate Amsden]

hardware only?

Article makes it sound like this isn't really a flashblade competitor(not complete at least) if there is no software to go along with the hardware.

Perhaps they are hoping some of the software defined storage players to pick this up and turn it into something more usable.

[Tom Womack]

Trivial complaint, but '8 x 512GB DDR3L DRAM' clearly ought to read '8 x 512MB DDR3L DRAM' - really very implausible to have more DRAM than Flash in this appliance!

[Adam 52]

Depends where you do the processing. Shifting data across the cluster is very inefficient, better to colocate data and processing - and that needs lots of local RAM.

...but that doesn't seem to be what this box is...

...so I expect it to sell into traditional IT departments that don't really understand what they're doing but are comfortable with big storage arrays.

[Jon Massey]

Not /that/ out of the blue...

StorageReview covered it two days ago! They've got hardware pics and corrects specs, too

[Anonymous Coward]

More like a flash in the pan.

Did Toshiba forget that Intel is trying to kill the Atom line of processors?

Everyone is waiting on ARM servers because Atom failed to strike a good balance between price and performance. If you want fast, responsive kit that will be serving user-facing applications, go with Xeon. If you want cheap, efficient kit for parallel computing dev environments or cold storage, go with ARM. There wasn't enough gray area in between those extremes to make the case for Atom servers, and a lot of Atom customers eventually upgraded to Xeon when their users got frustrated with the slow hardware. The major selling point of Atom was that it was based on x86 and could run the same applications that Xeons do, but customers took that literally and didn't assume that there would be a performance impact after switching over.