News

posted on 24 April 2008 08:46

EMC has exclusive rights to STEC flash memory solid state drives (SSDs) which means IBM, HDS and other drive array suppliers can't use them.

IBM blogger Barry Whyte says: "As for flash, the only real enterprise ready devices are those from STEC, who may be in trouble if Seagate get their way, but are off limits to the rest of use due to an exclusivity deal - nothing we can do there, but there are many fingers in many pies and all I can say is things will get interesting very soon now."

We might infer from this that IBM's DS8000 top end drive array will have a flash SSD tier zero added to it to accelerate the performance of drive I/O-bound applications. The announcement may be made in the next three months and could, could, feature Mtron.

There's also the possibility that IBM's SAN Volume Controller (SVC) might receive an SSD performance boost too.

It seems odd that STEC granted EMC exclusivity. I wonder what the precise terms of the deal are.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}