
Inside the IBM FlashSystem 900 All-Flash Array - desdiv
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ibm-flash-ssd-flashsystem-900-afa,31808.html
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DigitalJack
They must not be expecting to produce these at scale if they are loading them
with FPGAs. Or the markup is enormous. Being IBM, the latter might be it.

edit: looking at the picture, they are XC7K410T's. 500,000 flops... almost
2000 multipliers. Looking at the specs on FPGAs these days makes me giddy.

[http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/data_sheets/ds18...](http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/data_sheets/ds180_7Series_Overview.pdf)

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pliu
Your comment made me curious, so I went looking and found a price sheet. I see
two SKU's, one at $32K and one at $39K, I think probably this is just for the
chassis. The storage modules list at $22K, $46K and $92K for the 1.2TB, 2.9TB
and 5.7TB models, respectively.

I don't think too many people really end up paying list, but I have to imagine
the markups are very healthy.

This thing looks rad af. I work exclusively with IAAS stuff now, but in a past
life I used to spend a lot of time with enterprise hardware like this. I bet
those modules feel real good when you snap em in.

[http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/3/897/ENUS115-003/EN...](http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/3/897/ENUS115-003/ENUS-115-003-LIST_PRICES_2015_02_23.PDF)

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Sephr
The SM950 can be had at $300 for 512GB with 2.5/1.5 GB/s sequential read/write
and 300K IOPS. RAID together 6 of them in parallel and you'll have something
with better specs and storage than the 2.9TB module ($46K) for just $1.8K
(albeit with less endurance, though not sure how much less).

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trhway
IBM's margins are heavenly, no argument here. Yet what you propose is apple to
oranges. The SM950 would have endurance of 1K to may be 3K writes. The IBM's
flash is 10K. This is enterprise/database, not desktop, ie. you need the write
endurance. It is one of the main reasons why we don't see many database
servers with SSD arrays like you proposed, and instead we see huge RAM servers
with RAID-ed HDDs.

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kev009
That is bad engineering, HDDs have about the same drive writes per day as SDDs
once you get into the TB sized SSDs.

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kev009
Curious to see FPGAs at the center of a product like this, especially from IBM
which has always been willing to do low volume tapeouts (helps to own a
foundary)

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NKCSS
Think it's closely related to their Netezza line; a 'Big Data' storeage
solution that also features a FCPA-centered design for the storage/T-SQL
engine.

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kev009
I don't. I think they are using an FPGA because it is convenient and they are
willing to throw away some of the margins on their product for ease of
implementation. That particular FPGA has a PCIe hard IP, and they probably
implement the NAND read/write/balancing using its LUTs and interface using its
digital I/O. A consumer SSD (or really any product) might start off life like
this, and then tape out to an ASIC before release if it is going to ship in
any significant volume. The ASIC will have drastically lower power and, once
sufficient volume hits, much higher margins.

I don't buy the programmable argument either, you can implement programmable
cores (this is what basically any high feature NIC is like Chelsio,
SolarFlare, etc) while still baking in the PCIe, NAND interfaces, offloads
like CRC/erasure coding.

Those FPGAs each cost several hundred dollars. Imagine if each PCI device in
your computer (sound, network, video) had a full Xeon on board. Not entirely
dissimilar.

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duskwuff
> Those FPGAs each cost several hundred dollars.

Several hundred? Try several THOUSAND. Here's the part that's seen in the
photos:

[http://www.digikey.com/short/3pmq5w](http://www.digikey.com/short/3pmq5w)

A fully loaded FlashSystem has around $100,000 of FPGA silicon in it (12
modules x 4 FPGAs/module x ~$2000/FPGA).

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tthayer
Doesn't the Pure Flashblade do something similar?
[https://regmedia.co.uk/2016/03/13/flashblade_950.jpg](https://regmedia.co.uk/2016/03/13/flashblade_950.jpg)

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DonHopkins
When will the memory itself be running a database server? Or is that already a
thing?

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trhway
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVDIMM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVDIMM)

NVDIMM-N is basically flash backed RAM

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homero
Looks like it's for algorithmic trading

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NKCSS
...or the AD industry...

