EMC Project Lightning flash cards promised 'this year'
Weighing in at 320GB, for starters
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OpenWorld Oracle divulged at OpenWorld that the Project Lightning server flash card is in beta right now, and weighs in at 320GB of capacity in its initial configuration.
EMC's Project Lightning server flash cache
This device plugs into a PCI-Express peripheral slot – hopefully a PCI-Express 3.0 slot with its high bandwidth – just like other flash storage cards from Fusion-io, Seagate, STEC, Virident, and yes, Oracle.
EMC has said that the Project Lightning flash cards will ship before the end of the year. The main reason EMC wants these caches to be under control of the disk arrays – rather than servers and their operating systems – is the same one that has been EMC's reason for more than three decades: EMC sells storage and, like Oracle, it wants to control as much of the IT stack as it can.
And besides, EMC has a certain genius for flash. It was, after all, the original Symmetrix arrays – a big wad of main memory and a rack of cheap disks pretending to be a washing machine–style mainframe disk unit – that put the disk array maker on the map and eventually into a league where it is arguably one of the largest players in the IT racket. ®
COMMENTS
Can't wait...
Can't wait for another competitor to enter the game. The only real contender in this space (I feel) is Fusion IO and their price very much reflects this. They went from zero to hero and fought the hard slog to get where they are but they don't appear to be scared by the others in the market.
EMC joining the fray should hopefully change that and bring the prices down.
I don't believe much in the EMC hype around being to use the Flash card as a storage tier and being able to move data in and out of that tier....I think that's only being highlighted because it's a sole differentiator but until I see some more details I don't see the benefit.
Anyway, EMC's way of winning will be to purely rely on their name - they're already in a huge number of enterprise accounts and they're well known for top notch hardware.
cache schmash
Symmetrix, earlier in its life, was sub-branded ICDA - Integrated Cached Disk Array. The VMAX I'm running now has more RAM configured than the first Symmetrix I experienced had drive capacity..
Confused
Wait, I'm <see title>.
Why did Oracle divulge this EMC product at OOW?
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