Obvious but...
Pics, or it didn't happen.
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 …
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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.
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.