Lots of high end components has onboard RAM and flash. Big SAS cards have flash to store state in case of a power outage, there are realtime ethernet cards that

Lots of high end components has onboard RAM and flash. Big SAS cards have flash to store state in case of a power outage, there are realtime ethernet cards that control the entire ip stack themselves, etc. When you're working with huge datasets, it just makes sense to have data locality.