What's an enterprise SSD sale?

they wouldn’t pay themselves the margin of course

...unless there's a tax avoidance opportunity ;)

The volume is significant enough to make it worth recording, especially if Google decided to start selling to third parties.

They have expertise and market share, to ignore them as a player would distort the picture.

The point is to get an understanding of the scale on which SSD's are being built and used, and by whom. In that light, you have to include Google.

This question is only coming up because we're judging the adoption of a class of device in terms of dollars - that's an excellent way to measure adoption of, for example, dollar bills, but less optimal for anything else. It would be fascinating to see these totals next to total units shipped and total capacity - I think that (particularly combined with similar info for HDD market) would put things in perspective, and give a lot more insight about SSD usage trends. I think most of us would be most interested in those numbers for google's share, naturally.

Who needs fabs?

Why would I need a fab to make an SSD? Sure, you need a fab to make flash chips but not the completed units. Since the report refers specifically to SSDs that seems eminently plausible to me.

It would seem there's more than enough scope for fancy tricks at the controller and packaging level to make a custom disk attractive even with off-the-shelf flash.

If Google are specifying the design and manufacturers are producing somehting that is specific to google, then sure why not - but a USD metric is not useful since the other commercial vendors are selling with a mark up and google will be buying and deploying at cost (in which case the chart is skewed out of googles favour).

The only useful metric is GB

Why would the SSD market be different from other IT markets? Google also make their own servers but that's not included in Gartner's server #s (last time I checked)...

I am also curious to know how Garnter has come up with this estimate. Google is not exactly the most transparent company around. By the looks of it, Gartner has taken FuisionIO's number and cut it in half (i.e. mirroring FB's SSD consumption)

enterprise SSD sale

Enterprise SSD stands for enterprise solid-state drive or enterprise solid-state disk. this disk or drive is used to store data relentless or caches data temporarily in nonvolatile semiconductor memory and is intended for use in storage systems, servers, and direct-attached storage (DAS) devices.