I thought I should blog about EMC's enterprise SSD (or EFD) announcement this week, considering that it got so little attention from the press. Heck, we probably got more press for announcing our Tickets.com win than EMC got for announcing their new SSDs.
Maybe it was overshadowed by Cisco's UCS event, maybe the IBM/Sun mashup cast too large a shadow, ot maybe it's just because the whole SSD story is running out of gas, seeing as how nearly every array manufacturer offers them.
Except 3PAR. Yes, 3PAR will have SSDs someday. We are working with them, but are not in any rush to be a me too player. No, we aren't intimidated at all by EMC, the leading company in our industry and a tough competitor, and their large scale efforts to promote SSDs as the next great technology. SSDs have some terrific characteristics - especially low power consumption - which is something 3PAR works very hard on. In fact, the biggest advantage we see with SSD technology is reduced energy consumption - something we are very proud of with all our products.
But SSD performance doesn't make us flinch. Whether its for Oracle or SQL Server databases, media streaming, large Exchange installations or any mix of applications running concurrently on a VMware machine.
The reason is our industry leading wide striping. 3PAR InServ customers typically stripe their data across hundreds of disk drives, which means disk drive queues are short and contention problems are minimal. We have a software product called System Tuner to address situations in the unlikely event disk contention causes problems - and we have hardly sold any of it because customers rarely need it.
Most people know 3PAR for our industry leading thin provisioning and we have benefited a great deal from the fact that most other array companies offer it. There is a big difference between technologies that begin life as core architectures - as opposed to being bolt-on afterthoughts. Unfortunately for us, only a few competitors have developed "me too" wide striping features, which makes it more difficult for us to get the word out on it.
Performance is always an issue and sometimes old architectures have problems delivering it. Rather than re-architecting their systems to get wide striping performance, EMC (and now others) added SSDs. There's no question that implementing SSDs was a shorter path to high performance for them, but everything has it's trade offs, such as the initial high cost when technologies are new and extending designs with weaknesses, such as outdated storage provisioning methods.
Next to 3PAR's, the best wide striping implementations belong to XIV and Oracle's Exadata. XIV's implementation lacks high performance drives and the ability to scale to a large number of drives. Exadata does a good job with wide striping, but its a niche product and is pretty much useless for the mixed workload environments that most customers have.
3PAR InServ arrays may be the only viable way to get wide striping performance and scalability. That makes us different than everybody else. Our next-generation capacity saving Thin Provisioning does too, but the rest of the industry tries to make THAT issue a little less obvious.