Editor's Note: As of January 2009, approximately one year after EMC's announcement, the industry has responded. Most major system vendors (e.g. IBM, Sun, etc) have unveiled plans to begin shipping Flash or SSD. As well, major storage manufacturers including Hitachi have responded with announcements or intentions to announce. EMC remains ahead of the competition but it has taken nearly a year to get the initiative off the ground. Clearly EMC pre-announced to get a jump on the competition and integration, testing and adoption challenges remain. Nonetheless, the expectation in the Wikibon community is that flash and solid state disk technologies will become increasingly attractive over the next five years. Users should expect to prepare by re-thinking architectures and applications that can take advantage of this emerging technology.
EMC’s January 2008 DMX enhancements caught competitors by surprise with the inclusion of NAND-based flash devices and has shifted the marketing momentum back to EMC’s favor.
While many in the Wikibon community expect Hitachi to respond directly in 2008 to EMC’s solid state disk (SSD) announcement, as well as 1TB SATA drives, Hitachi clearly designed its USPV for a different approach, and in-box tiering, if it comes, is a defensive move responding to EMC's strong arguments for greater in-box tiering granularity as a requirement. Hitachi's USPV virtualized controller not only has substantial function but can also extend that function to systems external to the controller. Despite the added ‘hop’ to get to the external systems, this approach is viewed as superior to customers that want to extend the life of already installed assets.
Hitachi customers have no need to panic over this announcement. They can take a wait-and-see approach and evaluate the durability of NAND-based flash devices. But Hitachi’s marketing response will be critical to re-enforcing this thinking.
IBM’s posture is a bit of an enigma, as the company has not previously indicated its plans to keep pace with enhancements such as thin provisioning, although it still may do so in some fashion, perhaps invoking the SVC as part of that strategy. As a processor supplier, IBM may choose to address the performance problem with a combination of database and memory techniques. Also, many point out that IBM has used flash technology in its BladeServer product line, which is perfectly reasonable albeit a different technology than that deployed by EMC.
Based on existing messages, IBM customers are left wondering, and the company needs to be clearer about the direction of the DS8000 and its recent acquisition of XIV. Customers should press IBM hard for details or look elsewhere if functionality such as thin provisioning and ultra-high performance flash devices meet critical requirements.
Outside of the very high end of the market, the need to formally respond to EMC’s announcement is less pressing but will be a topic of interest among customers nonetheless. Competitors should evaluate the applicability of this technology in their respective markets, as consumer trends are driving prices on a steeper downward slope than those of conventional drives.
Action Item: EMC’s direct DMX competitors should demonstrate they have an understanding of flash-based storage and are working on a similar capability. They should educate customers on the challenges of durability of these devices and provide credible evidence that they have an approach to address the problem and integrate these products into their existing lines, all the while stressing that companies like STEC are OEM suppliers who typically don’t sign exclusive deals with a single customer.
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