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The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

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Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#3
post #2

Better than NAND performance if ever so slightly for a first generation memory product but I still feel like it would not able to scale to DRAM speeds. The search for a universal memory goes on...

They had a demo at Cebit showing that it outperforms RAM access "to the wrong CPU's RAM" via QPI on a dual socket board. For real world use cases I'd say that's not too bad.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#4
post #2

Better than NAND performance if ever so slightly for a first generation memory product but I still feel like it would not able to scale to DRAM speeds. The search for a universal memory goes on...

They're not advertising it as universal memory or a DRAM replacement though, so I'm not sure why you would make that comparison. They're advertising it as sitting between RAM and an SSD on the storage hierarchy, and it seems to mostly deliver on that promise.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#5
Impressive.

On a semi-related note, the fact that cloud providers offer managed Postgres databases is great, but things like this keep pushing me to think about bare metal in colo. A $20,000 server/backup combo with a couple of these will give me 5x the performance of a server that costs me $70k/year on AWS before provisioned IOPS. That's a huge gap to play with for taking care of your own maintenance costs.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#6
Some people like to claim that old storage technologies go away. But in reality old storage technologies live on along side of new... all that happens is that we end up having more tiers to deal with.

Drum magnetic memory has been replace but we still have spinning rust, tape, optical, DRAM, SRAM, SSD...

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#7
post #2

Better than NAND performance if ever so slightly for a first generation memory product but I still feel like it would not able to scale to DRAM speeds. The search for a universal memory goes on...

Good thing computers don't run on feelings.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#8

Impressive. On a semi-related note, the fact that cloud providers offer managed Postgres databases is great, but things like this keep pushing me to think about bare metal in colo. A $20,000 server/backup combo with a couple of these will give me 5x the performance of a server that costs me $70k/year on AWS before provisioned IOPS . That's a huge gap to play with for taking care of your own maintenance costs.

It has always been the case that owned metal is much cheaper than cloud. Cloud wins for things like very small machines (you can't buy 20% of a metal box); temporary deployments; and startups where the investors don't want to be on the hook for big $$ capex that they end up needing to shift on eBay post flame-out. Also where you just don't have the ability to run hardware (increasingly the case) and where for whatever reason the cost to deploy and run metal would add up to more than your $70k delta (easy if it needs one more person on staff).

Also remember that funky storage card may have a firmware bug that costs you hundreds of hours to track down and get resolved. That time could have been burned by Jeff Bezos' guys instead..

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#9
post #2

Better than NAND performance if ever so slightly for a first generation memory product but I still feel like it would not able to scale to DRAM speeds. The search for a universal memory goes on...

They're not advertising it as universal memory or a DRAM replacement though, so I'm not sure why you would make that comparison. They're advertising it as sitting between RAM and an SSD on the storage hierarchy, and it seems to mostly deliver on that promise.

One of the proposed uses for 3D XPoint has been replacing system memory, owing to its extremely low latency (which it has already delivered), high throughput, where it's early, and supposed almost unimaginable reliability/rewrites. In DIMM form it wouldn't have the overhead of a storage controller, could hypothetically be very parallel, etc.

It's extremely early in the technology, and I imagine we will get there. The first SSDs were terrible compared to SSDs now, and 3D XPoint as a technology is extremely scalable and refinable.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#10
post #8

Impressive. On a semi-related note, the fact that cloud providers offer managed Postgres databases is great, but things like this keep pushing me to think about bare metal in colo. A $20,000 server/backup combo with a couple of these will give me 5x the performance of a server that costs me $70k/year on AWS before provisioned IOPS . That's a huge gap to play with for taking care of your own maintenance costs.

It has always been the case that owned metal is much cheaper than cloud. Cloud wins for things like very small machines (you can't buy 20% of a metal box); temporary deployments; and startups where the investors don't want to be on the hook for big $$ capex that they end up needing to shift on eBay post flame-out. Also where you just don't have the ability to run hardware (increasingly the case) and where for whateve…

>where you just don't have the ability to run hardware (increasingly the case)

Softlayer has 'on demand' bare metal plans. I'm not sure how cost effective it would be compared compared to running your own box, but the simplicity is nice and they had me up and running in under 2 hours (assembled with customizations).

http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers

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