Fast forward two years and imagine what a stash of two dozen of these in a chassis would look like. Fronted by a stripped down *nix doing nothing but NFS. ZFS on the back end. Or maybe treated as a collection of bricks, two cards per brick linked together by infiniband/myrinet. Need more storage? Just add a brick. Schweeet....

'Course, SGI were doing storage bricks with high-bandwidth interconnect about five years ago but they got impaled on the Sword of Managerial Incompetence. Sad really.

Wow!

WOW!

Wow, I want one of those.

$18,000

Meh.

Technically true, but Xilinx make FPGAs. FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) are chips that consist of a big array of uncommitted logic that is told what to do at power-up time by downloading a honking big memory image into them. The design of the RAID5 controllers will not have been done by Xilinx, nor are Xilinx going to have been involved in that design in any way.

A friend of mine just commented "The papermill is not the author of the book". Xilinx may have made the chip, but what the chip actually does was wholly designed by someone (probably) at Ti.

I agree...

I WANT ONE I WANT ONE I WANT ONE I WANT ONE I WANT ONE I WANT ONE I WANT ONE I WANT ONE I WANT ONE I WANT ONE I WANT ONE I WANT ONE I WANT ONE I WANT ONE I WANT ONE....

wait, thats not true...

I WANT TEN I WANT TEN I WANT TEN I WANT TEN I WANT TEN I WANT TEN I WANT TEN I WANT TEN I WANT TEN I WANT TEN I WANT TEN I WANT TEN I WANT TEN I WANT TEN I WANT TEN

:)

Then again, price would have to drop substantially for me to be able to afford it. Maybe I could convince work it'd be good for their db servers, and accidentally order extra...

AC in case I put my plan into action

I remember back in the day of having to create a virtual RAM disk (when RAM wasn't cheap) in order to get my file processing jobs to complete in my lifetime. Now you have a chunk of hardware that probably works an order of magnitude more efficiently.

18K USD is cheap at the price for some of the companies who will be using it.

I hope they have some form of super capacitor to protect the small dram that typically front-ends those flash banks, else hello potential data loss, else by pass that cache and hope the wear leveling algorithms work (well).

Paris, because she wear levels nicely.