"Il vise également à mieux insérer les serveurs DPS 7000 dans des schémas ... des composants d'une architecture standard Intel® (bus, processeurs, mémoire, ... although it is implemented with commodity hardware building blocks. ..."
http://www.bull.com/servers/gcos7f/.../architecture_du_dps_7...

"From EMC (NYSE: EMC) to Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA), storage vendors seem to be turning more and more to x86 and commodity architectures for their arrays.

In general, storage vendors appear to be using Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and AMD (NYSE: AMD) products for higher-cost, higher-performance applications, and using custom chips for lower-cost, lower-performance ones.

"Many vendors are using Intel chips and chipsets that have built-in support for XOR and P+Q computations needed for RAID-6," said Brent Welch, director of software architecture at high-performance storage vendor Panasas. "Intel's i7 platform is quite powerful, and coupled with the XOR and P+Q features, it can eliminate the need for ASICs."

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An array design is much more than the central processor, said Clod Barrera, an IBM (NYSE: IBM) storage strategist.

"An off-the-shelf processor with sufficient MIP power is fine — there is no special value in proprietary chips," said Barrera. "The full attributes of a product are determined by MIP rate plus the cache design, internal bus design, adapter interfaces, nodal clustering scheme, and so on."

Economics, SSDs Drive Commodity Chip Trend
The reasons vendors are embracing commodity chips are straightforward, said Brian Garrett, technical director of the ESG Lab at Enterprise Strategy Group. Storage vendors have switched to commodity processors because of factors such as economies of scale, performance and energy efficiency, he said."
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/hardware/features/arti...