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Flash: Fibre Channel drives poised for the exit

In the year 2012

Enterprise flash startups

Outside the HDD manufacturers there are several enterprise SSD suppliers. STEC already supplies EMC and other enterprise storage array suppliers. Intel supplies Pillar Data and Sun. Fusion-io supplies SSD accelerators to HP and probably has something going on with IBM. Violin Memory has its enterprise SSD technology as does startup SandForce, which is making marketing noises about its OEM relationships.

Lastly there is Texas Memory Systems which typically does not do OEM deals but has a relationship with NetApp for that supplier's V-Series virtualising storage controller to front-end TMS SSD product.

That gives us eight suppliers poised to fight for a market which Seagate currently dominates and for which it currently has no SSD replacement product. Neither does Hitachi GST.

The net of this is that the HDD suppliers do not have enterprise flash products whereas three startups - STEC, Fusion-io and Violin Memory - do, one will have (SandForce), and TMS could do OEM deals to add more competitive pressure.

TMS may well think it needs to go the OEM route because its potential customers will be able to get TMS-like performance from their existing server and storage drive array vendors without having to go to TMS at all.

Customer flash migration patterns

How will customers with existing storage arrays using Fibre Channel drives migrate to flash once the NAND price erosion sparks such a move? They could buy new arrays. They could front-end existing arrays with a flash box and simply turn off the FC drives. They could replace FC drives in their arrays with SSDs but, unless done with the array supplier's consent this could invalidate warranties and service contracts.

Array suppliers like Compellent, Dell, EMC, H,P and Pillar have already announced flash drives. NetApp and 3PAR have said they will do so as have HDS and Sun. They won't want to let incoming suppliers front-end their arrays in customer data centres with SSD boxes and will surely price and ship product to prevent that happening.

Another aspect of data centre flash data storage it is that server vendors could start putting SSDs on their servers, SSD direct-attached storage, that would allow them to store data on their servers that currently goes to disk drive arrays.

If Vellante's right it looks like this is going to be a strongly contested market. ®

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