There are also similar products being introduced by HPE, Dell, Supermicro, etc...
Posted here since it's pretty surprising how far commodity x86 servers have come.
For example, there are very few scenarios I can think of where even large startups would need more then 32TB of DDR5-4800 RAM or more then a few 400G Ethernet links on a single system.
As the marketing states, this isn't targeted to startups of any size, or any other organization capable of writing software. It has exactly one application: SAP HANA. SAP is a large and valuable company with many users of their terrible program, reputed to be among the worst programs ever perpetrated, which is nevertheless quite widespread.
It's very likely there will be some customers not running HANA shops.
But anyways, whomever buys them, it probably has a small overlap with the average HN reader. So it's meant as an illustrative example in a familiar context.
EDIT: Then again it's possible someone might buy it for personal use, e.g. if someone has multiple terabytes of spreadsheets that they need to work on simultaneously.
> many users of their terrible program, reputed to be among the worst programs ever perpetrated
And yet, no one has produced something better. Everyone complains Concur is dogshit but no one has presented a worthy competitor. Where is the "SAP killer" startup? I'm sure someone will publish one to GitHub any day now.
Just like Threads, the "Twitter killer", dead on arrival.
I made a SAP killer in lotus Notes. Ok maybe not exactly, but at IBM the choice was to wait for SAP to come in and do the project management with that, or have me (intern) port existing non Y2K compliant green screen project management program to Lotus Notes. It wouldn’t be as feature rich as SAP but it would do what was needed.
Because I cost many orders of magnitude less and my Boss kinda figured rightly the SAP project would be really late, they ended up with my database application which the users liked because I added features to make their lives easier.
Custom tailored apps really can be an amazing thing. I wonder why more companies never really got on board with the Notes/FileMaker databases. My lab currently has a pretty custom management system that tracks everything, prints labels and just really is a force multiplier.
A huge number of companies developed custom internal Lotus Notes (IBM Domino) applications. It just wasn't widely publicized.
Notes was great for quick and dirty workflow applications. You could literally build and deploy some simple functionality in minutes. But it also made certain more advanced features effectively impossible to build at all; it just wasn't a general purpose platform. And the fact that source code was locked up inside binary files created huge obstacles to working in larger teams.
Pretty much every expense system I've ever used was better than Concur. When the business is using SAP for everything else it doesn't really matter what minor stuff like that is best of breed though.
I work with internal systems for a living. As an end user, you’re not the primary customer - finance is. Concur is by no stretch amazing, but it works fairly well on the back end where your expenses come in, route for approval, get paid, get accounted for, etc.
I’m not trying to be dismissive. I absolutely try for the best internal user experience across the board, and it’s led me to try a lot of the shinier startup T&E systems. But Concur works well for finance and accounting, and frankly, it’s also cheap - something you also have to factor in G&A tooling. Those two factors together have overcome my desire to rip it out at a couple of different employers.
And given the price sensitivity for a tool that does not generate revenue for its customers, it remains a tough space for new entrants to disrupt. It’s not enough to make it good, you also gotta make it cheap. When I’m done with the startup carousel, I might try my hand at this - but you should bet against me!
Nothing is more exemplary of Oracle's incompetence than the #1 database company being unable to produce competitive ERP systems that are nothing but databases with front ends.
ERP is also something that should technically be achievable with a large industry-sponsored open source project but it never happens.
This completely misses what the SAP business actually entails. No one runs "SAP". They run "SAP as customized for business X". That customization costs millions of dollars. It encodes every little specific thing about the business. Companies run their entire operation on top of it. It's impossible to replace, because it can't go down. Ever.
An open source version would be only step one, and not that useful by itself. You'd still need to create the entire consultant ecosystem SAP has on top.
> is a large and valuable company with many users of their terrible program, reputed to be among the worst programs ever perpetrated, which is nevertheless quite widespread.
A very good description of Microsoft or Google (and Apple getting there soon).
If all that 15 PCIe x16 could be used for CXL at PCIe 5.0 speeds, that'd be just shy of 1TBps of attached memory, and one could hypothetically scale out to whatever size one wanted too.
Samsung dropped a 256GB CXL memory drive quite recently. These numbers should keep climbing and climbing. Very early days still yes. Sure does seem like in-memory will be enough for most users soon.
And CXL 3.0 introduces switching. So multiple servers can connect to the same memory device. Tons of interesting options to revise how things work as that starts to happen. The conventional ideas of networking are kind of silly when you can just have some other computer access the same memory.
If your data is mutable, as in most situations where one uses a database, you still have to hit the disk for writes and wait for a disk sync before continuing after the writes.
Reads are indeed fast, but a proper RDBMS will instantly use all of that memory capacity for caching anyway, meaning that you get the same read speeds even with the RDBMS. No need to change your code.
There are certain algorithms that are more used on in memory data structures that could be leveraged and never touch disk, not just simply boosting a relational database.
Also 12 power supplies and 24 fans. That's up to 96 amps @220V or 21KW, although I imagine it draws less than half that since the power supplies are n+n redundant. If you were thinking about getting one for home, a circuit for a typical electric drier or range wouldn't even be rated for this.
I have a Dell R960 with 96 sticks of 64gb ram which sums up to 6TB. But damn would I love to have one of these, not only for the much higher capacity but also the higher memory bandwidth from ddr5.
> Kinda of crazy, my first computer had a million times less ram than this.
My first computer had a billion times less RAM than this: not even 32 KB (16 KB actually). My everyday computer has 2 million times the RAM of my first computer (16 KB vs 32 GB).
And now we're waiting for the real dinosaurs here to comment!
What gets me is how it has made all my intuitions about how to program incorrect with time. And I'm no dinosaur. I started with an old obsolete machine with 128 KB. I remember getting a hand-me-down PC with a 486 (virtual memory at last!) and 16 megabytes of RAM and I couldn't imagine how I could ever use that much memory, besides for multimedia. Still hard to imagine, sometimes. How long to sort a vector of 1 million simple elements? Intuition says about a minute, but it's milliseconds. How big a working set before cache thrashing? My intuition is attuned to single-digit kilobytes, but it's multi-digit megabytes now.
There's a diagram at https://www.storagereview.com/news/3rd-gen-intel-xeon-scalab... which does a good job showing the links between individual CPUs. There's a performance penalty to access data in memory attached to other CPUs, which reduces use cases.
I speced out a 4 sockets sapphire rapids dell server with 16tb ram, it came out to over 1.2M, so imagine with 32tb... But really no one should be paying retail for these.
I remember back in the day working in companies of 15-40 people. There'd be ONE server. That ran everything you needed -- auth, DNS, file sharing, email server, application servers, web servers for internal apps, database server for internal apps. Usually sourced from a local MSP - or at least you had a support contract with them.
You didn't need a rack. You also had something that wasn't designed for a rack, so it could be in a secure back room with the switches, a UPS, a router, maybe some external storage... where it'd just sit quietly. Just has some big slow fans because that's all it needs.
Trust me, still a thing in small businesses, small retail stores, restaurants, etc.
Posted here since it's pretty surprising how far commodity x86 servers have come.
For example, there are very few scenarios I can think of where even large startups would need more then 32TB of DDR5-4800 RAM or more then a few 400G Ethernet links on a single system.