News from the SSD front

Posted by Howard Marks on June 17, 2009

While I firmly believe we at BnS spend too much time on inside baseball I must admit it's entertaining to talk about stock prices and off the wall technologies that may never actually make it to a data center near you.  Since I just couldn't face writing the umpteenth installment in the never ending archive saga this afternoon we'll go back to the SSD market where STEC has hit a billion dollar market cap while startups are bragging about 500,000 IOPS and the storage equivalent of power too cheap to meter.

Since everyone in the storage industry, especially old George down the page, seems obsessed with the Data Domain bidding war the fact that STEC's stock hit $23 a share giving them a market cap of over a billion dollars or half a Data Domain should peak some folks attention as well. Even considering that STEC's ZEUS IOPS drives lead the performance race and have won design wins from EMC, HP, Compellent and pretty much everyone else that will let you put a handful of SSDs in a disk array their 208 P/E is well into nosebleed territory. After all DD closed today at a little over $32 (so the market thinks EMC will hold up their paddle one more time) for a P/E of 107.

While ZEUS IOPS are impressively fast the single level cell flash technology they use makes them just a bit pricy with 36GB drives going for around $9000 on the street where Intel's X25-E, used by Pillar and Equallogic who do wide striping across SSDs so they can get by with the slower but still SLC flash, goes for under a thousand for 64GB. MLC flash is even cheaper but has significant limitations on write cycles and write performance making it suitable for laptops and USB keys but not production disk arrays even in the midrange let alone the Syms and USP-Vs of the world.