For those who came in late Optane is Intel’s implementation of its 3D XPoint technology, developed initially in partnership with Micron.

Last year, Micron exited the business of 3D XPoint chip and drive manufacturing, and sold off its XPoint foundry in Lehi, Utah, which supplied components to Intel.

Mann said Intel is ”about to announce gen 3 and working on the next generation [which] will do CXL Memory tiering.”

Intel is apparently working closely with VMware on getting vSphere and allied software developed to use Optane persistent memory. Project Capitola was cited, and Intel is working with other hypervisor makers, too.

Hypervisors need to be adapted to spot the difference between DRAM and XPoint memory, while application-level code does not need to be altered.

Intel showed an example involving searching data ingested through Kafka and Splunk with the information stored on a VAST Data system with 650TB of Optane SSD and QLC NAND SSD capacity.

A search of this data took 29.5 seconds on an HP Ezmeral system using direct-attached SSDs, and 25.1 seconds on Intel’s setup. We note that VAST’s software had reduced the already-compressed Splunk data; the 650TB VAST Box could store more than 1.6PB of Splunk data.

Mann showed a dual-socket 28-core Intel Xeon server fitted with 512GB of DRAM and 2TB of Optane persistent memory, costing $14,664 with an Nvidia A100 GPU-powered server system needing a pair of 64-core AMD host processors with 2TB of DRAM, with the overall system costing around $150,000.