Economic downturn to fuel flash SSD buying rampage!

Bad timing happens to even the most successful companies.  Coming out with a new expensive product at a time when budgets are being cut is a case of bad timing.  As any good salesman will tell you - its better to be lucky than good.

EMC, one of the leaders in our industry introduced flash SSDs last January, which put most of the rest of the industry hot on their heels to follow them. 3PAR was an exception.  It may be quite fashionable to have SSD products coming to market that few can afford, but we aren't joining the dance line yet. 

That doesn't mean we aren't working on flash SSDs because we are.  Its pretty cool technology and we are integrating into our product architecture in a way that makes sense for our customers - efficiently, cost effectively and easy to manage.

In the meantime, we will continue to sell highly virtualized, very intelligent arrays that help customers consolidate storage and manage their runaway capacity problems without sacrificing performance. 

Comments

[Barry Whyte]

Time will tell. SSD's do have their place in todays boxes when capacity is less important wrt performance. However the price needs to drop - and I'm sure it will.

However, I do love all the "virtualized" comments people make, inbox virtualization in not really anything more than jumping on the v work bandwagon. OK, yes so it helps, but by those terms my $75 AMD mobo at home is virtualized as it provides logical disks made out of physical ones...

Cross device, cross vendor, cross controller abstraction, thats real virtualization.

[Martin G]

Oh here we go again....what is storage virtualisation?? We really need to nail the terminology; can we all agree that all the storage arrays provide virtualisation in that they allow physical disks to be divided into logical luns and then shared to multiple hosts. This is pretty much a basic function of an array; without this, you have DAS!

Then we have Storage Array Partitioning; so we can split arrays into Logical Arrays and allow them to be managed as seperate entities. 3Par and IBM definately have this; EMC have cache partitioning etc, etc.

And then we have Storage Array Federation; which allows us to treat a group of physical arrays as a single logical array; within that logical array, we can do everything that we might be able to expect to do within a single physical array, for example Snaps, Clones etc. It also will often have the ability to allow replication between geographically seperated arrays which may be of different types. This is what most people understand as Storage Virtualisation. SVC, USP, Invista, StoreAge, NetApp vSeries may all be considered to provide this level of storage virtualisation with differing levels of capability/functionality.