Is EMC looking away from STEC?
Since STEC revealed that EMC had over-ordered back in November last year, the company has been waiting for EMC orders to get back on track. Will they? It's now five months since STEC revealed this: One of our customers entered into a $120 million supply agreement with us for shipments covering the second half of 2009. We …
Looks like someone at EMC bought the SSD hype! I'm guessing they fell for that usual supplier line "You'd better order plenty now 'cos all your competitors have said they're gonna order LOADS, and you wouldn't want to be left out, would you?" Meanwhile, back in the marketplace, us customers said "Hmmmm, nice and fast, but at that price we just don't need that many."
If anyone from EMC purchasing is reading this, have you heard about the latest and greatest, sure-thing investment - Florida Everglades property investment! Just make sure you have $millions to spare and dial 800-IAMASUCKER....
Have you thought that standardization of a particular line might require a bulk purchase with similar if not identical attributes. I am looking at SSD for home use, but it is worse than the fastest processor on the market how SSDs seem to one up each other every other week...and the degradation in performance has my eyebrows arched in mild suspicion.
Back to topic: If one would be designing a test harness for that type of thing to assure quality, then variance in the units beyond a single model would not be good. You could save a lot of time NOT baselining for each new batch that came through.
Not ruling out that they got nabbed, since EMC is a bit gunshy about drawing the ire of El Reg and the analysts when they effectively fail at the fundamental job of running a decent warehouse... (cannot find the Register article but the quote was brilliant)
I think the crazy Symmetrix gravy train may be coming to an end. Take up of Vmax seems to be slow in some of the shops I have worked in. 3PAR, IBM XIV, and a drabble of Compellent seems to be eating into some of the mid-range/ lower high-range. Tiering within a box can be a false economy, your're still putting "tier 2" on ultra expensive tier 1. If you can bang out 40-50k IOPS on a product that is half the price, then tier 1 needs to provide value propositions that usually aren't there.
Sign up, sign up for Blocks and Files, The Reg's weekly storage newsletter
