For starters, let’s cover the basics very briefly. VFCache is server-based flash cache (at least mostly and usually it is – users also have the option of splitting the card to use some as cache and some as persistent storage). It integrates with EMC’s ‘FAST’ (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) and thereby extends FAST up into the server. The impact for users is either more transactions and/or less wait time, depending on what floats your storage and application boats. As such, it is aimed squarely at databases, OLTP, e-mail, analytics and the like…places that need storage ‘ooomph,’ are mostly read activity, and where a relatively small percentage of the data drives a very large percentage of the I/O activity. This is simply because the PCIe based flash used in VFCache remains (like all flash) relatively expensive and so it needs to be used -

• For prime caching opportunities – to spread the cost impact and have it make better IT-economic-sense.
• In mission-critical applications - to make spending even the ameliorated-$$ worthwhile in a business-economic-sense).

That’s it in a nutshell – like all good things it’s pretty easy to ‘get’ the concept.

So, what about the impact? I suspect many competitors will miss the point and talk functional intricacies rather than impact….specsmanship rather than market importance. Indeed it is true that EMC is not the first to use server-based flash/cache. In fact, EMC often isn’t first into things for the enterprise market, although – somewhat ironically given our topic here – it was EMC that kicked off the current ‘solid-state era’ when it introduced Enterprise Flash Drives in early 2008!  But competitive rebukes of the ‘yes but we were first/faster/bigger/wash whiter’ variety, are frankly missing the point. I was reminded of a great quote I saw when reading on a plane last week: ”Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other” (William Faulkner, quoted in the Associated Press). Why do I say that here? Well the facts may well be – or might not, but that’s not the point here – that someone else can go faster in some manner, or has some better management in some way. But the truth is that this is EMC making the introduction – this is a market leader that has shipped over 24 PB of flash to date with way over an Exabyte of storage under the management of FAST. VFCache being the absolute best in any one area doesn’t matter (and for all I know EMC is best in all of the technical aspects…). What matters is that it is more than good enough for most users and applications. It offers tremendous throughput and response time improvements, and does so within a management construct that myriad users already employ, and furthermore it has the extensive underlying security (HS, data protection, shareability) that users expect from EMC.

So, yes, this is a significant product announcement…but is far more of a market announcment. EMC is giving its formal blessing to server-based flash, and indeed to flash throughout the storage ecosystem. The next iteration that EMC has indicated having sometime next quarter is ‘Thunder,’ a network flash appliance. Combined, these products show a clear direction to users, and maybe offer some solace and opportunity to all the start-ups entering the solid-state storage market. Clearly it ain’t all about spinning rust any more….and if you didn’t buy into that before today, maybe now it is time to believe.

Bottom line? This particular lightning is way more than flashy - it packs a market punch.

Well, so what, you might say….most people don’t give much thought to how many atoms  it takes to store data. After all, a bit isn’t much is it? I need a few gigs for my latest Hollywood blockbuster! Well, think on this – a single bit can usually take around one million atoms to store!  So suddenly 12 is looking awfully good. I’m optimistic in so many areas of life (from power to food to transport) that mankind will remain continually ingenious and figure ways around seemingly intractable problems. For decades you may have heard about the superparamagnetic effect…basically it’s what prevents us packing data ever-more-densely because the magnetic field of each bit starts interacting and affecting the others around it. We’ve found innovative ways around it – vertical recording technology, for instance - but the essence of the problem has remained. As the absolute demand for storage has grown faster than the relative price decline of storage, so we’ve also concentrated on ways to make better use of the space we actually have: hence the popularity of things like thin provisioning, deduplication, etc., etc. But in historical terms we’re only putting fingers in the dam, fighting a losing battle as valiantly as we can.

The news from IBM provides hope. Yes, it’s ‘only’ research, but this early stage storage capability offers the potential to be literally orders of magnitude more dense than anything we have today. As to the cold I mentioned? Well, right now the antiferromagnetism used by the IBM boffins is being deployed at 1 degree Kelvin (minus 458 Fahrenheit, which is distinctly chilly!) and the data is only retained for hours. BUT, that’s not the point….early cars only went at a few miles an hour and had someone with a red flag walk in front of them, early telephones were all hard-wired, and – hey – downloading a single photo over the early WWW just a few years ago was something you only did if you had plenty of time to spare. We’ll figure this out, too.

Meantime, it’s very normal to make predictions at this time of year, with blogs and articles awash with prognostications…I won’t be immune from that over the coming weeks but for now I figure I’ll do something a little different by looking backwards in order to look forwards; and in so doing come up with one prediction of which I’m supremely confident.

Of course, once I found the stash of old pocket diaries I couldn’t help but look through them, whether or not they were applicable to the naturalization paperwork. Apparently I used to have a life! But I figure you’re not that interested in the plays I saw, parties I attended, and parenting events I undertook!? So I picked a few things of interest…before wondering what we would have predicted for 2012 from a decade or two ago?

First off, some of you may be too young to really have appreciated a good pocket diary – these things were mines of information….from world time-zones and public holidays (pretty useful) to wine vintages, metric/imperial conversions and atlases so tiny that you could barely make out the continents let alone cities. But there were also pages to note your expenses (no Excel back then!) and I was able to look back at all my achieved sales numbers through the years – at least until everything went electronic and of course I have no idea where, or if, the more recent records are! [I'm sure there's a pertinent point in that!] Of rather more drama, it reminded me of one of my managers in the UK that was murdered (the rumor was that it was a ‘hit,’ although whether the result of marital issues or conducting ‘dodgy’ leasing deals was never clear). Even more dramatic is the fact that the map of the World has changed notably in the last few decades….Europe alone looks crucially different from when I was selling round tape drives to British Airways! On an almost  similar theme (because Germany is one of those changed geographies), but of no marked importance to the world, I found a distressingly large notation of when I got my first BMW….and the polo events that they’d invite me to, not realizing that I was a meager company-car-3-series-driver and not likely to be splurging big, real money of my own anytime!

So, trying to look forwards as if from back then, what can I say? I could lie and tell you that today’s technologies were clear to all, but that would be disingenuous in the extreme. After all – just to put it in perspective – I’m writing this blog on my BlackBerry in an airport, and later I’ll – wirelessly of course – clean it up and load it to the ‘Cloud’ site that supports it. Heck, I thought I was cool and space-age when I first got a car-phone, so I can’t lay claim to having figured out the impact or capabilities of this ‘Internet Age’! Actually maybe it was/is the ‘Information Age’….I know this for a fact because I can see that one of the myriad courses I attended back then was at Cranfield Management Centre in 1997 and it was called “Reinventing Competitive Advantage in the Information Age!”

Computing in the years before that – at least to me as an early business user – was lots of columns of green numbers on a black screen…..there were no products with an ‘i’ in front of them back then, and the line between corporate and personal computing (to the limited extent it even existed) was very solid and very wide. Basically, there were mainframes doing big, important work and people in corduroys and white coats that operated them. In fact, that perhaps brings us to one of the big changes – and it’s not technical at all. As we’re re-creating the concepts of a mainframe world in many respects (VDI running in the things called Clouds, over the Internet, accessing Big Data and interconnected up the wazzoo, create a massive global mainframe ‘feel’) the attire of choice for IT folks is getting a big change – and it’s not even jeans, as these days our web-based world means PJ’s are just as likely to be the sartorial choice.

What then is my semi-serious, but likely correct, prediction for 2012 and beyond? Forget the evolutionary technical advances, and watch the advance of the flannel revolution! This may read like just a whimsical point, but – like my old hand-written pocket calendars – there’s a lot more in it than you’d think.

Why the uptick? Steve Wexler asked me just that question for a recent Network World article, and I quote from his piece:

…everyone will finally get used to the idea that most of the basis for the increased adoption of solid state is – surprisingly perhaps – economic, because the performance of solid state usually allows an economic improvement elsewhere (less short-stroking for instance is the obvious example). “For most users and apps (there’s always edgy exceptions) the raw performance of solid state exceeds what they can realistically use… however it is that very performance that frees them to make other changes that deliver economic value, both in their storage/IT and for their business.”

As I mentioned in my last blog entry ESG conducted in-depth research in the second half of 2011 (here’s the link if you subscribe to our research) to find out what is going on in the solid-state storage market and in the minds of users regarding both their adoption and use of solid-state. The second ESG Brief on the topic has also just been posted (here’s the link) and it deals specifically with the applications to which solid-state is now being applied (the first Brief from earlier in December dealt with adoption rates and the influences upon them). A couple of the key points from an application perspective are these:

1. Whereas solid-state has to date often been bought in association with particular applications and/or workloads, planned solid-state purchases are more likely to be for ‘horizontal’ infrastructural value – just over half of potential solid-state storage adopters in the research did not believe that their organizations will deploy the technology as a means to address specific application performance challenges, but will use it more generally across workloads.
2. Users have a growing understanding of the value of solid-state in virtualized environments -   current users of solid state were more than twice as likely as potential adopters to single out IO bottlenecks caused by server virtualization as the primary reason for initial solid-state storage adoption.

Because of the easier use, growing choice and understanding, and economic value – and me not being one to ever miss a punning opportunity! – I feel certain that 2012 will be a year of solid progress for solid-state as a storage tool.

This small but very precise example is just one insight into why solid-state is commanding such attention of late; real performance impacts that can lead to measurable business value. So, in the second half of last year ESG conducted in-depth research (here’s the link if you subscribe to our research) to find out what is going on in the solid-state storage market and in the minds of users regarding both their adoption and use of solid-state. We wanted to replace guesswork and assumption with accuracy and fact – after all, in this business it’s easy to equate the amount of discussion around a particular topic with the amount of implementation and forget that adoption curves are way different to chat/blogosphere trending curves!

Here’s what some of the headline results told us -

1. The use of all sorts of solid-state is increasing, although obviously it represents way more as a percentage of IO than as a percentage of TB.
2. Users are pretty happy with what they’re getting in terms of results, although (and this is an editorial, anecdotal comment outside of the research) many users I’ve spoken with lately are frustrated at the ‘specsmanship’ that has permeated the market of late and which leads to some disappointment relative to the marketing promises despite impressive and pleasing absolute results!
3. The uses of solid-state are shifting, both in its physical placement within server and storage infrastructures and its implementation (SSD’s remain popular but cards used as caches and all/hybrid flash appliance are becoming more available) as well as its application focus (which is moving from largely vertical to be more a horizontal play).

Because the results are so interesting and pertinent to the market, my Christmas and New Year present to those committed enough to read this blog regularly is to let you know that a couple of briefs will be posted in the next week or so (one is planned before Christmas and one before the New Year). These two pieces will cover the research highlights of – respectively – the adoption and application of solid state. Keep an eye on the ESG home page for the postings. Meantime, enjoy the mathematical challenge I set you  - chances are you’ll be working out the answer on something that uses solid-state!

And so the recently announced move by Imation to add scalable storage systems to its product portfolio made for a notable piece of news. Given Imation’s history in providing some of the media ingredients that eventually help with storing and protecting data (specifically its various tape products, and the RDX removable disk media) one might imagine that a move into data protection appliances would be a logical – and perhaps sufficient – first step. Indeed, the recent acquisition of the InfiniVault product from ProStor only goes to support that thought….as well as to provide a fine appliance tool for Imation’s new portfolio in that area. But Imation has much broader intentions than that, and it is embroiled in developing a far more general set of storage products, aimed very specifically at the SMB market segment. Disk systems, archive systems, data protection appliances, and software for management and tiering: it’s a heck of a tough market – albeit a buoyant one – to enter, and one might wonder why Imation wants to butt heads with the likes of Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, and NetApp, to name just a handful alphabetically. Of course – coming back to my initial point – we understand why start-ups do this: there are enormous revenue opportunities in the storage market, and a successful start-up is always aimed at grabbing a share and very often aimed at grabbing a partner to buy it out and make its founders wealthy. Most start-ups also have either a unique idea or are early into a new technology wave. No issues here. But for an established vendor like Imation, the motivations are less obvious–yes, less obvious maybe, but nonetheless very pragmatic and potentially still very rewarding.

Aside from the attractive margins and the unabated growth in the storage market, Imation has two strong – non-technology-based – advantages that simultaneously underpin and motivate its horizontal expansion into the storage arena: brand and channel. Everyone knows that technology matters in the IT business but these other two factors – brand to some degree and distribution to a huge degree – matter tremendously. The combination of these two elements is not only the difference between a pure start-up and starting up in a business, it’s also the explanation of why it can be an attractive proposition for a mature organization like Imation, and makes its move an understandable and interesting one. It is aiming its products at a market it understands (and where it has brand equity) and through a successful channel that exists. Many a start-up would like to start up with those two things!

Of course, one of the dangers of being a new visitor somewhere in your middle-age is that you tend to compare things to what you already know; I hope my visitors didn’t get too frustrated when I’d comment on the ‘British-ness’ of one thing and then the ‘American-ness’ of the next….when of course I should have been talking about the Australian-ness of it all!

So, let’s start with the quintessentially Ozzie: the first thing you get to appreciate is the uniformly friendly, helpful people - even a smile and a big ‘welcome’ at immigration!  And – let’s hit this really early – yes, I got to see kangaroos in the wild! Conversely I don’t think I saw Fosters Lager the whole time I was there, and it was a whole week before someone wished me a “G’day” (the common greeting was “How’s it going?”). Next up, the coffee: once you get used to the naming conventions – I, for instance, found I liked a strong flat white, which I know doesn’t sound that great! – it’s easy for a coffee-lover like me to enjoy a country that runs on the stuff; and that serves good to simply great coffee all over the place. To get between their coffee stops Ozzies have all the cars you’d recognize…plus a few you would not: Holden is the local GM brand, while ‘utes’ are a particular modern / throwback / plain / neon  manifestation of practicality. They combine the front end of a car – often with a muscle engine – and the rear of a truck, but are low slung and the truck bed has a hard-top cover.  They look like vertically compressed American trucks.

Now, at the risk of inciting my Australian friends and colleagues, let’s take a look at a few of those ‘mixed heritage’ things. You could, for instance, happily take both your British and American nieces and nephews out to buy confectionary (‘candy’ or ‘sweets’ would bias the point) as you can get most of what each other country produces. Driving on the left side (or as the locals would say, ‘the right [correct] side’) of the road is quickly pointed out to be the majority choice of the global driving population! The local papers were enormous (not in content necessarily) but in sheer sheet size, whereas the local TV news seemed to have a generous share of people who were clearly learning on the job! However, for my adopted American homeland needs, I was able to catch up with some live NFL, so all was not lost; and, to placate my British roots, the ground and first floors in buildings were two different places!

I cannot recall a bad meal for the entire time I was there - everything from cafes to the higher-end stuff was done with care (although I can’t comment on the global fast-food places which I managed to avoid). A country that has excellent steak and great fish-and-chips has to be good! There was however one aspect of the eating culture that blew my tiny little mind. Imagine being at a sizable dinner event (it could be a wedding or – in my case – it was a couple of excellent business events that the folks at HDS laid on), and you’re awaiting your food. Two starters (or as the locals call them ‘entrees’), two entrees (or as the  locals call them ‘mains’ or ‘main course’) and two desserts (thankfully also called desserts or this would all be getting too much!) are available. Sounds good and familiar so far? Well, then things change: each person receives each course, but the available options are rigorously alternated from diner to diner.  The first time this happened I felt I must have made some choice when I signed up for the event…but I soon learned otherwise. The next evening there were actually menus outlining the options for each course; I was relieved as the ‘Carpaccio of Southern Highlands Beef’ and ‘Milly Hill Lamb’ sounded preferable to the ‘Rotolo of Small Cow Farm Feta’ and ‘Free Range Lilydale Chicken”. And I have to admit I wasn’t too bothered about the ‘Chocolate Brownie’ but knew I would not pick the ‘Lemon, Lime Brulee’. And indeed I did not pick the Brulee…as I did not get to pick anything! The menu was clearly just designed to tantalize; to let me know what I was missing out on! Now, of course, swapping is permitted, but wouldn’t it just be easier to ask in the first place? Plus, it’s one thing to swap with family, but imagine sitting at a business dinner, no doubt meeting some people for the first time: “….well, as I was saying, your use of scale-out NAS for your private cloud seems eminently sensible, but I’d like to ask your view of application-specific solid state dis….hang on, do you want your lamb, or could we swap…”. Ho hum, I’m obviously easily entertained; indeed, as  time went on, my hosts looked forward to the quizzical looks that I could not avoid displaying as this little mealtime drama was played out again!

In stark contrast - and why I feel Australians could indeed be trusted to ask for what they want at formal dinners - was the crowd behavior at airports. I have taken flights all around the world, and am invariably saddened and bemused by the crush at the gate as boarding time approaches. It’s as if everyone has been warned that there are fewer seats on the plane than there are ticketed passengers so you must abandon all manners and just shove. As the time to board gets ever closer, so personal space diminishes as the edgy crowd edges closer to the plane…and to each other. Not so in Australia!  No rush, no bundle of humanity, just an ordered saunter to the plane. Maybe it’s because they are not all at boiling point after the initial parts of the airport experience: like no need to take your shoes off for security and the fact that you can still get to the gate to wave goodbye or greet people, and - shock, horror – it’s perfectly normal to board a plane without having shown an ID. I dutifully complied with the relaxed approach of course; mind you, in my case it was probably because I was in a state of shock at having parted with $28  AUS – closer to $30 US – for a paperback book! [Australia - at least the populous bits I was in - is an expensive place to visit, partly 'just because', partly because it is doing well economically, and partly because its currency is strong]. This might explain why they invented plastic money (really – they did – it’s great)….to stop people tearing up the paper stuff in frustration at what it won’t buy!

So, there you have a few of the things that I noticed. I figure a chatty blog over the Thanksgiving weekend makes a nice change (well it did for me!). I tried to steer clear of the obvious touristy stuff as you’ll all be familiar with that anyhow - impressive and relaxed downtown Sydney, with its iconic Opera House and Harbour Bridge (if you go, climb it, it’s well worth it), the elegance of Canberra, and the beauty of places like Byron Bay. These things are all great, but to me the little things make a big difference too. Where else could you engender laughter, interest, and debate by asking a group of locals why they have an emu and a kangaroo on their country’s coat of arms!? (answers gratefully received btw, as I’m still not sure whether or not I was being fed a line on this one….). It’s a wonderful, vibrant country and society, and it’s a shame I went for business! I’m grateful and sorry in equal measure that I got to see a little of the place. If it’s not obvious already, I’m very much hoping to have another chance to visit.

My hosts for the visit were HDS, for whom I spoke at–and moderated–a channel partner conference, and then got the opportunity to speak at a number of other smaller events and with a myriad of end-users in a variety of settings. My thanks go out to my Hitachi hosts (a smart and capable bunch indeed…must be the British influence!) their channel partners and all the customers I met for allowing me to open my big mouth (hopefully not too much and with some imparted value) and even my big ears (hopefully plenty), so as to engage in many frank and enlightening discussions.

For a country of–I hope I have this correct–only about 22 million people (each of whom seems to have a coffee shop or stand from what I could tell!) there is a vibrant and accomplished IT sector. And I’m not using the descriptors lightly. First, of course it helps to be in a region of the world that has remained far less affected by the GFC than most of the rest of us. Ah, yes, the ‘GFC’? I’d never heard of it either….but it stands for the Global Financial Crisis. Clearly if you’re not actually suffering its ravages as badly as others, you have time to give it a name!

There is growth, success, and optimism; certainly there was in the businesses I met with. Indeed, dealing with growth is one of their primary challenges.  In itself that’s not a particularly special issue, but the scale of things makes Australia Inc perhaps a tad more aggressive in its search for efficiencies. On the one hand it demands–as a mature economy in terms of complexity and expectations–all the sophistications one would expect of a modern society.  On the other it represents a small % of the global GDP so the sheer critical mass to have everything in IT at the levels usually needed isn’t always available. Hence there’s a huge appetite for things such as virtualization, with levels of adoption running much higher than I’m used to seeing. The relatively high cost of electrical power (which is likely to increase further as a result of scarcity, combined with a strong ‘green’ socio-political agenda that has just led to the passage of a Carbon Tax) only serves to make that appetite keener. Such aspects drive ingenuity and a need for efficiency, which vendors there are keen to mirror and fulfill. And it’s a pragmatic approach–of course there’s the sophistication of things such as (in deference to my hosts I’ll use their examples) VSP and HDDS, but equally I even met a large, high-end scientific user that is literally just getting into tape–because for them it is the only sensible approach to the ‘oodle-a-bytes’ of data they have to deal with.

Now, I don’t want to suggest that every organization there is a paragon of IT virtue. I met a number of ‘intransigents’, as one does everywhere. But the vast majority of the users I met were not only talking about current storage trends–tiering, solid-state, cloud implementations–they were adopting and living them, already on second efforts, and sometimes teaching me just as much as my ESG research was able to educate them. I think one of the reasons for all this ‘leading-edginess’ is indeed the imbalance of scale and expectations in the country which forces innovation. But also I think distance does indeed come into it–Australia is often used as a pilot or test site by non-Australia-based IT vendors (aka pretty much all of the industry) for new tools  and approaches….precisely because it is so far away from wherever head-office happens to be. It’s strange that in these days of instant electronic communications, things like time-zones and thousands of miles/kilometers really still do matter. Of course, that distance-factor is a two-way-street and it also allows the local subsidiaries of international organizations to be a tad more imaginative and flexible (using different partners, having special programs, etc.) than they might be were they under a more continually, close, watchful corporate gaze in Chicago, Berlin, or Osaka.

You get it–I was impressed. As one who lives a mile (or 1.6 kilometers) high in Colorado, my view may of course have been affected by all that oxygen at sea-level, or just as likely by the constraints on my oxygen intake as a result of wearing a tie more than I have in decades. But I don’t think so. It was similar but different; it was a world away, in a good way.

In terms of connections, the link to another new market entrant–Virident–is the continuing, imaginative, and extended use of solid state. Since solid state remains relatively expensive, it is important to both vendors and users that the maximum value is extracted from it. Virident’s approach is to use its software to drive even better performance from [pretty much any] solid state. It fixes a number of performance problems that are often found with flash, especially over time (and that doesn’t mean months and years….flash performance can drop about as fast as the value of a new car being driven off the lot if it is not managed well). Perhaps just as important, Virident also drives predictable performance from flash, and avoids ’sawtooth’ response times that are tough for IT organizations to deal with–no shop wants its normal IO completion to jump from microseconds to seconds! And–crucial to any new technology–Virident is also about improving economics as much as it is about improving performance.

My blog title mentioned ‘collections’ which is simply a reference to the fact that there’s still plenty of money being applied to the storage business: the aforementioned NexGen just closed a $10M round…not long back Coraid received $50M…both these examples were over-subscribed which is also good for them and for the industry as a whole….meantime Huawei is buying full control of Huawei-Symantec….and, while not only about storage of course, Warren Buffett has made it public that his fund now owns a little more than 5% of IBM (well over a $10B investment…nearer to $11B in fact but who’s counting!?).

* Note that ’local’ is a relative term and not strictly temporally accurate, since I’m writing this from Australia where I’ve been for over a week to speak at an HDS partner conference and meet with a wide range of end-users. More on this in my next post…

Spectra is an interesting mix. There are few companies in this business for which I might use the words “venerable” and “fresh” in the same sentence; and yet, this relatively small vendor, known primarily for its tape libraries, deserves both descriptors. Still private after 32 years, the company has been doing remarkably well of late (growing around 30% and being profitable) and held a full press and analyst event last week to drive home the point that it is still full of ideas and  a desire to grow. Using a theme of “from molecules to galaxies,” there were details and announcements (some pending) on everything from the reliability of tape (which is much better in terms of errors per TB than disk–who knew!?), through service (with a “PriceLock” guarantee that customers will love), and, of course, also to products, which include the new 3.6 exabyte capacity, 400,000 slot ExaScale T-Finity library. Given that the death of tape has been one of the longest-running bad jokes in IT, Spectra has plenty of evidence to the contrary. Everyone has always known that tape is the least expensive data storage media, but finding data and ensuring it’s readable once it’s found have been issues … but the recent arrival of file systems for tape (think of a self-aware, exabyte sized USB drive!) and Spectra’s self-describing “Media Lifecycle Management” remove those concerns.

At what would appear to be the other end of the storage spectrum, there is news of a $25M funding round at SolidFire, a Boulder start-up that is developing an all-solid-state storage array. As SolidFire has emerged from stealth earlier this year, it is gradually sharing more publicly about its status. Of course, the solid state arena is (no pun intended) on fire right now. But this is not a case of simply adding an SSD to a standard RAID and JBOD stack; instead, SolidFire’s efforts are focused on a purpose-built array that is optimized for cloud service providers and private cloud implementers, and the company already has early systems out in the field. Speaking (as I was earlier in this piece) of terms that one might not usually expect to occupy one sentence, the idea of “solid state” and “cloud” might at first seem strange to some. But the juxtaposition reveals a couple of truths about solid state that often go unnoticed: first, it ain’t all about oodles of family photos “out there somewhere” … there are serious cloud-based apps both in existence and coming onstream where performance really matters. Second, solid state, when implemented well, can be just as much about economics as it is about performance. It is this mix that SolidFire (joining a small cadre of other innovators in this area) is seeking to capture and make available.

So what’s my third connection? Well, strange as it may seem, it’s the connection between tape and solid state. I think Spectra and SolidFire may be more “connected” than they realize … and not just because they both have bikes parked in their offices (almost de rigeur for a Boulder company!). Now, to the best of my knowledge, there are no actual links between the two organizations and I’m not trying to create any rumors. I’m talking concepts, whereby I think that solid state and tape are good for each other and may grow in unison. After all, for decades we’ve relied on spinning disks to deliver two things: capacity and performance. Frankly, they don’t really excel at either. No, no, no … the world won’t change overnight, but with solid state being really good at IOPS (perhaps even delivering them economically … but SolidFire wouldn’t advocate decades-old- legal files stored merely for “what if” scenarios  to be placed on its arrays) and with tape being really good at capacity and retention (rather obviously, I don’t see Spectra suggesting its library handling OLTP demands) and with better tiering and automated data management (not to mention business and economic pressure to do better and cheaper simultaneously) arriving every day, well, you get my point. Someone is going to make a connection …