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Comment by comatose_kid | Hacker News Reader

"$8,000 for a 160GB model" according to the article. But looking at Newegg.com, it seems that you can buy 24GB of RAM for $750 so 8K could buy you 240GB with some cash left over.

And looking at supermicro's page, their 4U tower allows you to populate up to 192GB....

Naive analysis, since it doesn't take into account um..persistence, but still interesting to see how expensive these fusion io parts are...

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The RAMCloud[1] project at Stanford tackles the problem of persistence. Each server has a RAM and a persistent store like a hard disk. The entire cluster's disks are used for persistence.

[1]: http://fiz.stanford.edu:8081/display/ramcloud/Home

Where are you going to insert all this RAM? Did you calculate the number of motherboards you would need and how you'd connect all that?

Also, RAM resets as soon as you restart your computer.

You can buy a Dell R715 today with default configuration and 256GiB RAM for the low, low price of $26,231.

It's only naive in the Emperor's New Clothes sense.

High-end SSD[1] pricing has never made sense to me, but, then, I expect that the target market is "enterprise," where paying for the cost of sales, even/especially when it's a hefty multiple of the cost of the technology, is the norm.

ETA: The primary value of having something like this on the end of a PCIe or disk interface tether is that the size limit for a single machine becomes much higher than a single unit's capacity.

[1] Including DRAM-based ones historically, not just modern flash-based ones.

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