Can Anyone Challenge STEC?

It's been about 18 months since STEC released theirastoundingly fast ZEUS iops flash SSD establishing what EMC dubbed the enterpriseflash drive (EFD) market.  Since thenjust about every array vendor targeting the enterprise or high performancemidrange market has integrated the ZEUS iops into their arrays.  This begs the question where's the secondsource?

While many companies take MLC flash chips and turn them intoSATA SSDs for laptops and speed freak enthusiasts building systems that letthem kill zombies faster than their friends and neighbors no one else buildingdevices with SAS or Fibre Channel interfaces that turn in even half theperformance of a ZEUS iops.  Last monthSTEC announced that an unnamed customer (I'm guessing it has a three lettername and headquarters in the northeast) will buy $120 millon worth of ZEUS iopswhich drove their stock up to $34.

You would think seeing STEC selling for a 300:1 P:E ratiowould have a Sand Hill Road VCs waving money at silicon valley engineers tocome up with a SAS SSD that turned in even half of the ZEUS iops' 16K writeIOPs.  This may change soon as Toshiba andBitMicro have announced Fibre Channel interface SLC based devices and SandForce'sSF-1500 controller promises 30K IOPs if and when someone packages it up into a fullmodule with a SATA or SAS interface.

For products shipping in volume the closest anyone's come todate are Intel and Samsung's SLC SSDs both of which have SATA interfaces only.Intel's X25-E deliver's 3.3K IOPs almost a quarter the ZEUS iops' performanceand does it for a street price of around $700 for 64GB. Given that a 73GB ZEUSiops could set you back $15,000 1/5^th the performance for 1/20^th

the price could be a good deal.In fact a Dell Equallogic and Pillar are using Samsung andIntel SSDs respectively and selling them a whole shelf at a time.  Since both vendors build the RAID controllerthey can work around the limitations of the SATA interfaces these lower cost devicesuse by directly connecting each device to the controller without the loops orother FC conversion midrange or high end arrays have to use. As a result theycan deliver 20K IOPS to applications at a price their mid market customers canafford.

Using 12 or 16 64GB SSDs rather than a few 73GB STECs theyalso minimize the amount of application tuning users have to do to takeadvantage of SSDs. Rather than analyze who the heavy email users are and movingthem to a 20GB Exchange information store on expensive SSDs you could just moveall 300GB of Exchange data to an SSD shelf.

From where I sit it looks like the original RAID vs. SLED(single large expensive drive) argument all over again. Well we know who wonthat one.

What do you think? Should EMC offer this class device inClariions?