Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.<p>As I replied in a sub-thread, I think Intel's marketing diagram [1] is probably useful to help separate the Optane flavors. This is about the "near DRAM" variant.<p>While the blog post highlights running SAP HANA (SAP's in-memory focused database), you can use them for whatever you want. The persistent part is that it's persistent across reboots. The <i>hope</i> is that this might make it easier to have tiered database/caching systems, since the gap between DRAM and this new "memory" is much closer than say DRAM and SSD.<p>[1] <a href="https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/05/filling-the-gaps-between-memory-and-storage-after.png" rel="nofollow">https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/...</a>
I still do not completely understand what SAP HANA really is:<p>- an in-memory database technology?<p>- the name for SAP’s cloud platform?<p>- an on-premise DB to run SAP ERP (to replace Oracle)?<p>- a full-stack proprietary web development platform?<p>- a marketing term to solve all problems with SAP products?<p>Does anyone have an hands on experience with HANA, beyond the usual marketing BS? Is is that revolutionary? If it runs on such specialized hardware, is the speed increase that impressive?
One of the most interesting applications of NVM is databases. The design of most existing databases is predicated on needing to always persist writes to disk; the existence of non-volatile memory allows very different, potentially much faster designs. There's a great explanation of this in <a href="https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2017/p1753-arulraj.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2017/p1753-arulraj.pdf</a>
Does anyone know much about the tech on this? I assume when they say persistent they mean across VM restarts, but are they actually doing some sort of disk persistence too?
Redis on Optane [1]. The GraphBLAS stars continue to align [2]. GPUs/TPUs next. Distributed to come.<p>[1] Redis on Optane <a href="https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-enterprise-flash-intel-optane/" rel="nofollow">https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-enterprise-flash-intel-opta...</a><p>[2] GraphBLAS & RedisGraph <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099520" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099520</a>
Would this be a good fit for Smalltalk, as it is image based? It seems it can remove a level of complexity, if you can treat your image, and so all your objects, as constantly persisted?