Google selling SSDs
Maybe they are just reselling old SSDs that have been replaced by newer ones in their data centers?
Tech analyst Gartner has lifted the lid on its numbers for SSD shipments in 2012 and thanks to Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers, El Reg has some pie chart eye candy for you. First of all, it looks like the startups are catching up with the big vendors in some sectors, which is good news for competition. Also, Google is …
With this one people had to wait 15 days before claiming - but still claim within 45 days of purchase - leaving a window of 30 days, so it seems Samsung's SSD cashback offer does indeed fall into your definition of "scammy" :)
But I followed it all the the letter and... still no cashback :)
Samsung! 말보다 증거
I've not seen Google branded SSD's though I presume from the back of this article that they are inside the various Google rack mounted boxes we get
I'm guessing Google just brought their own SSD manufacturing ability to save cash. And considering they send a number of backups in case the first one goes down (it never has, but we have 4 backups for some reason) the numbers of SSD's are high.
I didn't see Micron or Dell in the enterprise SSD numbers, which I find surprising. EMC is also missing, even though they deliver both drives and PCIe cards. Of course they may be included in other suppliers numbers.
I haven't been able to surface the original Gartner report on the Internet yet. Is it public domain or copyright?
Disclosure - I work for NetApp.
Not sure how Gartner calculated their numbers, but as of mid-2013, NetApp has shipped over 50PB of FlashCache (formerly known as PAM II) alone. More impressive is that Real-time data (vs policy) driven auto-tiering technology is accelerating > 5 Exabytes of disk.
Once again viewing capacity shipped relative to revenue reveals much more about the storage industry and value delivered to customers!