Hi, this is from Chuck Hollis (EMC), so you've been warned ...
First, the technology works as advertised. Concerns about wear-leveling, etc. have been addressed to our satisfaction with additional layers.
Much like "disk drives can fail" so we have RAID, etc. -- the discussion is not that much different.
Second, the bet is that flash technologies will come down far faster in price than spinning media, simply because you're leveraging the "silicon curve". Order-of-magnitude greater capacity and order-of-magnitude cost-reductions are not hard to scenario, given past history with other semiconductor technologies.
Philosophically, it feels like a replay of the "commodity disk vs. expensive disk" discussions that began in earnest in the early 1990s. Small form-factor inexpensive disks did a great job of storing data if you did RAID, caching, etc. Heck, that's what got EMC and other storage vendors going back in the day.
We're guessing that -- given the competitiveness of this market, and its very large size -- we'll see costs come down faster than anyone has any right to expect.
Bottom line -- flash won't obsolete FC (or SAS, or whatever) drives. We'll just end up using a lot less of them.
- I agree that NAND technology is very likely to work as a replacement for even the most demanding short-stroked disks - it will just cost more. I have modified the text to (I hope) reflect this better. Agreed that flash technologies will come down significantly faster than disk densities. Nice way of putting it - I have included that (with attribution) in the article.
I am not sure I understand the analogy to the "commodity disk vs. expensive disk" discussions. In the case of NAND, it could be argued that the more expensive technology that is replacing the cheaper technology,the opposite of the commodity disk vs. expensive disk. Maybe you could clarify, Chuck. Either way, the conclusions are the same, that NAND will be adopted in the enterprise storage hierarchy reasonably quickly replacing high-performance drives, but that high-density disk drives are not going away.
Thanks for the comments, Chuck - feel free to edit the piece directly to clarify things.
David Floyer