04 March 2015

Crow's Nest Soup

For some time now, the SSD/flash reviewer on AnandTech and I have had a bit of feud. Nothing serious, but amounting to:
Young: "Real enterprise flash storage is done by small companies you ain't never heard of implementing bespoke devices."
Vatto: "Enterprise flash storage just buy commodity SSD from Intel and such and box them up."
Young: "You really ought to spend some time reading up storagesearch.com."

And so it went. Until today. SanDisk announced its Fusion-io based array. SanDisk bought FIO last summer. Didn't take too long to get in the saddle.

Vatto had some conciliatory words, I'm not mentioned, of course.
The storage array market is certainly changing and the companies that used to rule the space are starting to lose market share to smaller, yet innovative companies.

Always was that way.
It's not a surprise that the InfiniFlash is the densest all-flash array on the planet because as a NAND manufacturer SanDisk has the supply and engineering talent to put 8TB behind a single controller with a very space efficient design.

Well, that's a guess unless and until one opens up the latest from IBM FlashSystem, nee Texas Memory, or EMC (XtremIO) and so on. Enterprise hard drive has moved from the 3390 and such to racks of "commodity" HDD; they aren't really, they just look like PC drives. WD has STEC and Skyera. Wonder what's baking in that oven?

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