At current enterprise NVMe prices, the drives alone for this must easily push past the $500k to $1M mark. It's fascinating to see this level of density, but it’s strictly going to be hyperscaler or high-end defense/research budget territory for a long time.
I believe the rationale is that they are so much denser than they will compensate the price difference over the entire lifetime of the system. A 10 TB install is a full rack otherwise and this is 5% of the space. Colocation for HFT tends to be expensive and using 5% of the space for the same amount of data might make sense.
It is kinda neat how the density can trickle down. When an individual SSD can hold tens of TBs, recent-gen drives can do millions of random reads/s each, and one socket can handle lots of RAM and many cores, it doesn't take the fancier chassis with two sockets or lots of storage bays to handle pretty substantial data work.
On the other hand, current part prices are not neat; a commodity platform only helps so much if none of what you want put in it is affordable! And other factors like power and cooling can push you away from optimizing for density. I just like that along with the ludicrious becoming possible, merely great stuff becomes more feasible.
I'd double your guess on this one
The list price seems to be ~40M. https://www.dell.com/en-hk/shop/servers-storage-and-networki... Select the 40 slot chassis and put 40 of those 245TB disks in. Comes out at ~HK$317M. Of course HK prices might also be higher than what Dell USA offers.
Now how heavy the discounts you can get I don't know.