VMworld 2018 US - at Intel, James Myers shows PCIe/Ruler/M.2 NVMe SSDs, Optane, and QLC NAND

[WPSent]

Wow, that's a lot of virtual servers. Pretty neat.

[supremelawfirm]

From my own personal observations, but not from any direct professional experience with Optane devices, I believe that Intel made some serious marketing mistakes with this new memory technology. First of all, the original predictions for its expected performance were exaggerations that did not come true. Then, after raising the market's expectations, Intel disappointed large sectors of the market by designing a "caching" M.2 which used only x2 PCIe lanes, when the M.2 edge connector was always designed to utilize x4 PCIe lanes. Given the massive financial investment that Optane required to develop and manufacture, Intel probably could have recovered that R&D investment faster with a different product mix right out of the starting gate. I still believe that a comparable mix of U.2 and M.2 Optanes would have provided Intel with extremely valuable market feedback, particularly if their capacities were adequate to satisfy the market's needs. One of the U.2 versions comes with an M.2 adapter, and that option was a good move on Intel's part. Finally, the VROC "dongle" disaster only hurt Intel in the long run, particularly when the competition offered much better solutions. The market deserves integrated bootable NVMe chipset support for all modern RAID modes, just like the current situation with integrated chipset support for RAID arrays of SATA drives. Similarly, for many years Intel has also offered PCIe RAID controllers with fan-out cables, but there are still precious few of such add-in cards with NVMe support e.g. Highpoint SSD7120. And, because Intel's DMI 3.0 link has such a limited upstream bandwidth for RAID arrays, Intel's engineers should started sooner to circumvent that bandwidth limitation e.g. with BIOS/UEFI support for 4x4 bifurcation of x16 PCIe expansion slots. Bottom line: if Intel had always intended Optane for large data centers and large server systems, they should have done a better job of managing the expectations of the prosumer and enthusiast market sector. It is not all that unusual for prosumers to design a bootable RAID array of solid-state drives, that allow a fresh install of a Windows OS to that RAID array. ASRock responded within 24 hours to my request for written instructions to accomplish that very thing, with their X399M motherboard.