Comment by riehwvfbk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by riehwvfbk | Hacker News Reader

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One could see the death of Optane coming from a mile away. It was only kept afloat by Intel, and its main issue that is was really cool tech, but it was a solution looking for a problem.

You need scratch space that's resilient to a power outage? An NVDIMM is faster and cheaper. You need fast storage? Flash keeps getting faster and cheaper. Optane was squeezed from both sides and could never hope to generate the volume needed to cut costs.

So now imagine that you are at Intel deciding what initiatives to fund. The company is in trouble and needs to show some movement out of the red, preferably quickly. It also lost momentum and lost ground to competitors, so it needs to focus. What do you do? You kill all the side projects that will never make much money. And of course you kill a lot of innovation in the process, but how would you justify the alternative?

Isn’t NVMe disks basically same value as optane? Comments saying optane was amazing doesn’t make sense if NVMe is basically as good and there are other NVMe disk manufacturers

They are not really the same.

First, NVMe is a protocol to access block storage. It can be used to access any kind of block device, Optane, SSD, NVDIMM, virtual storage on EC2, etc. So it's true that the protocol is the same (well, not quite - more on this in a bit), but that's like saying a server is the same as an iPhone because they can both speak TCP/IP.

What was the "more in a bit" bit? Persistent memory (PMEM) devices like NVDIMMs and Optane can usually speak two protocols. They can either act as storage, or as memory expansion. But this memory also happens to be non-volatile.

This was sold as a revolution, but it turned out that it's not easy for current operating systems and applications to deal with memory with vastly different latencies. Also it turns out that software is buggy, and being able to lose state by rebooting is useful. And so Optane in memory mode never really caught on, and these devices were mostly used as a storage tier. However: look up MemVerge.

So you are right that it turned out to be a faster SSD, but the original promise was a lot more. And here comes the big problem: because Optane was envisioned as a separate kind of product between RAM and SSD, the big price differential could be justified. If it's just a faster SSD - well, the market has spoken.

Thanks for the great explanation

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