Re: A few points
Dear Netapp employee from E8 employee,
1. The E8 storage host layer (agent) never caches. It would be great if you can show where you read that it does. All the E8 performance benchmarks and publications are done with 100% random access, always served from NVMe storage and going NVMe end-to-end.
2. Contrary to what you wrote, DGX-1 and indeed any server with a GPU is just a Linux server and can run any software, including but not limited to the E8 agent.
3. The AI training data, even referred to in Netapp's own publication, is *images* which are not compressible; and are unique hence not de-dupable either. Not sure where you came up with the statement "remarkably compressible".
4. "300GB/s out of a single Netapp cluster": it's interesting that Netapp's own SPC-2 submissions go up to about 11GB/s. Maybe you can share with the world how big would a 300GB/s Netapp cluster be (2 racks of equipment by my estimate), how much it would cost ($4M by my estimate). In the case of E8, a 2U shelf does 42GB/s so with 7 shelves (14U) you can get 300GB/s; dismissing the SSDs the cost of that is <$200K.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
