Absolutely, catching the train to This Time Tomorrow stands out.

@TEK
or they're finally ditching the freakin DC power brick and doing straight AC to the unit.

It's the going price for an 802.11n router with a 1Gb switch. Linksys has a similarly priced product with a similar feature-set, iirc.

when you're done with the condescending attitude, the airport express is not 3x3. It's a rectangle.
3x3 likely refers to the 3 bands x 3 radios (one radio each of 802.11b, g and n). That way you don't have to knock down the speed of the radio to accept connections from all three bands.

It has 4 independent SAS controllers -- those numbers are aggregates for sure.

Yes, but you are assuming all data benefits from caching. That might be true for db environments where a small set of queries are constantly made but in a great number of environments, this is not the case and you're just inserting latency into your network with one of these cache boxes. Beyond that, caching does little if anything on the write side. These Sun boxes bring the speed directly to the array, no matter the data type or uniformity of IO.

They are not different solutions for the same problem, they address two very distinct problems.

you're talking about two distinct product categories here. The xcela thing is purely a caching appliance and relies on cachable data. This sun product is a storage array.

Oh, another thing. This took a while to get to market because Sun fabbed their own flash modules for this. They're basically SO-DIMMs with a lil sata(?) controller onboard. They wanted to be as cooling and space efficient as possible. You can get it in 20, 40 and 80 DIMM configurations (and naturally performance will depend on how many you get).
http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/sss/f5100/

It's quite innovative. The HPC sector (specifically truly high-perf file systems) have been begging for something like this. File Systems like Lustre and GPFS really love to have separate storage for metadata. The capacity requirements are very low but the IOPS requirements are through the roof. If you can pull off in 1U what literally takes a rack or two worth of spinning disk to achieve, you're going to have high-end customers banging on the door in seconds.

We had an NDA presentation a few months back about these things. The IOPS numbers (obviously) come from small block IO (~4K). The main drawback, however, is the inability to get those numbers out of a single large volume. These things have several SAS controllers that can't talk to each other. As a result, you have to carve out a minimum of 4(?) LUNs. Those 4 LUNs have to be equally distributed over the available SAS links to the host AND be utilitized at 100% each to get the peak perf. Not that you could really find a single host that'll push those numbers, but it's still an annoying draw-back.

All that aside, the arch is pretty neat. Super capacitors for power instead of batteries -- super fast charge, just enough capacity to flush IO in a power failure. We would have loved to get one of these to test with Lustre -- aside from the minimum of 4 LUNs, these are ideal for Lustre metadata storage. 4k IO, and super-uniform seek times and multipath capable -- who cares about capacity?