I am in complete awe of EMC’s marketing prowess when it comes to pre-announcements like this week’s Flash SSD support for their stagnant Symmetrix DMX-4 product line. There is no doubt the clever strategic leaking of the press release to the Wall Street Journal (which does not have the technical prowess to properly see thru the marketing hype) followed by analyst and media briefings helped fuel the fire of positive exposure. Extensive blogging wisely helped further fan the flames. Kudos to EMC for orchestrating such an event.
But why am I still shocked?
Because the so-called industry pundits were actually acting more like industry parrots. The way I see it:
EMC got away with spinning high performance despite their failure to disclose even a single benchmark result or reference customer confirming the benefit in their environment.
- EMC got away without conceding the true costs of this solution when deployed in a recommended best-practice config. For example has anyone considered that microsecond latencies for persistent storage means parity calculation overhead matters? Does that mean EMC will recommend mirroring these SSD’s for maximum performance? What would that cost?
- Given the internal bottlenecks in the DMX architecture and subsequent limits in numbers of SSD’s which can be configured, has EMC delivered metrics showing their expensive flash storage option delivers better cost/performance than merely adding more RAM to the host?
- From a storage utilization perspective, doesn't the (unnamed large U.S. financial institution) customer quote in the WSJ article confirm that EMC forces customers to buy more capacity than they need so that they can short-stroke the necessary level of performance out of it all?
Mojo, Mario and Gary got it right. Respectively, they pointed out this is merely a marketing exercise which needs to be validated via proper Bench-Sizing and demonstrated to have better resulting manageability than superior approaches such as more scalable caching.
EMC won this battle, but who will win the war?
By pre-announcing a forthcoming flash storage option ahead of their rivals, EMC has created much-needed halo effect for the aging DMX platform. EMC has also exposed the potential of flash technology to the enterprise storage market.
However “Shock & Awe” doesn’t win wars. I predict storage vendors who can successfully deliver the benefits of flash technology to the broadest possible set of customers with a consistent management framework will be the ultimate winners.
True students of WAFL and Flash should be positively giddy at the potential for the two technologies to come together in an almost perfectly complementary way. I’m very excited about our roadmap in this regard, but I’ll have to wait for another day before I can share anything formal with you on this blog.