Are you a developer looking to try your application on Intel Optane (and cannot afford the Intel Optane 900p?) Intel and Packet are partnering to bring Intel Optane technology to developers via Packet’s Intel Xeon Scalable fleet, at no cost. The companies hope this will provide an easy way for open source and commercial software projects to benchmark and optimize for storage class memory without having to source drives themselves.

Intel Optane using 3D XPoint for storage is simply the fastest, generally available, storage that you can buy today. It is great to see that Intel and Packet are working to get this technology in the hands of more users. On the other hand, Intel Optane is affordable at this point. You can get 1TB of Optane drives for around $1200 these days which is a significant premium to NAND flash but represents major cost savings over RAM. In the future, this class of technology is what the industry is calling storage class memory or SCM. As we progress into 2018, this is going to be a bigger story as Optane will be moving off the slow PCIe bus and directly into DIMM slots with Intel Apache Pass.

Intel Optane Coverage on STH

Here is a selection of Intel Optane coverage from STH. Intel has a fairly wide array of low capacity products on the market so you can get the benefits of

Intel and Packet Collaboration on Optane

You can read more about the collaboration here.