Congratulations to Fusion IO for pulling off the most visible, most large-scale event in the storage industry in recent months: their highly successful IPO. And congratulations to Xiotech for pulling off the storage industry's most important event in recent months: the GA release of Hybrid ISE storage blades.
Fusion IO
Fusion IO went public and traded up in an over-subscribed offering. The excitement about the company and its prospects are justified: the storage industry has been basically ignoring its large and growing performance problem for years now. The industry has toyed with a variety of ineffective strategies involving the obvious alternative technology, SSD, but done nothing to move the performance needle.
The brilliance of Fusion IO is to come out with a new category of product; they call it "memory storage." It's a board that you typically put into a server.
This is the brilliant part! The people who run applications have a huge performance problem, and the storage "experts" refuse to solve it for them, so Fusion IO gives them something in "their world" -- a server board -- that they can use, along with application changes, to solve their problem. It's a classic strategy: sell to the guy who actually has the problem.
Here's the other thing I like about Fusion IO: their success clearly and unambiguously demonstrates that applications are experiencing storage performance problems, and that these problems are house-is-burning serious.
Xiotech Hybrid ISE Storage Blade
Xiotech's release for GA (general availability) of the Hybrid ISE last week is the most important recent event in the storage industry.
The success of Fusion IO clearly demonstrates that increasing numbers of applications are experiencing house-is-burning performance issues. Most of the traditional SAN storage vendors have responded by simply putting SSD drives into their existing products. In all cases, the result has been modest upticks in performance coupled with drastic reductions in capacity and dramatic increases in cost. Not a good combination, and not popular with customers.
The Fusion IO approach works well for the small number of companies who have just a couple of hugely important applications that are completely under their control, and who therefore don't mind violating the normal principles of storage management and re-writing their applications to take advantage of server-based storage. In fact, I've just described exactly the situations of FaceBook and Apple, who between them account for more than two thirds of Fusion IO's recent revenues!
What about the vast majority of companies who have pressing performance problems and don't want to or simply can't break the bank and madly rewrite their applications? What they need is a new kind of storage they can just plug in and make their problems disappear: storage that is affordable, reasonably priced, many times faster than what they have. In other words, storage that is, well, storage, that looks and acts like normal storage in every way ... except that it is hugely faster, like five to ten times faster.
Hybrid ISE, that's your cue...
The Xiotech Hybrid ISE. The right combination of HDD, SSD and RAM cache in a 3U rack-mount package to provide the excellent performance and capacity your applications need. Just by plugging it in. Check it out!
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