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Comment by bkeroack | Hacker News Reader

500k sustained random IOPS from a single device is remarkable. To put that in perspective, 500k PIOPS in AWS would cost you $32,500/month (https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/).

This drive looks like it would be amazing for database workloads, for example.

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I remember when the rule of thumb for big storage arrays was "100 IOPS per disk." It's still only that with common desktop disks and only 200-ish for enterprise SAS disks. This device provides the equivalent of 2500-5000 disks of IOPS. Latency, particularly write latency, should be better than flash as well.

The price isn't too bad really; a Samsung 960 PRO M.2 1TB is $600 for a little more than twice the storage. It's still early days for 3d xpoint; Intel and Micron will build on this. Exciting stuff.

An EC2 I3 has up to 3.3 million IOPS.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/02/now-avail...

"Up to". Also we don't know how many underlying SSD devices there are, which is my point. This is a single drive that supports radically more sustained random IOPS than we've ever seen, at a very low price point compared to comparable solutions.

That's with eight 1.9 TB devices. You can scale it down, of course.

Anyway, the point is you do not need to spend anywhere near $32,500/m to get that kind of performance from AWS. (As long as you don't mind using non-EBS storage.) In this case, an i3.16xlarge is $27,856 per YEAR (if paid upfront).

I like to use my AWS ops to send SMS messages so I can really get the most out of my service providers.

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