Fusion-io Makes SSDs More Affordable: Page 3 of 3

Fusion-io's approach not only presents a challenge to its competitors, but it also increases the potential market through the basic economics of price elasticity. But can this work? History gives two illustrations of how a similar approach succeeded. In the early 1990s, EMC became preeminent in the mainframe disk storage market using SCSI technology with mirroring. Mirroring doubles the price of storage, but still EMC was able to make a compelling economic case and became the leading supplier of mainframe storage in an era when "no one ever got fired for buying IBM." The second case is more recent—the rapid adoption of SATA technology in enterprise storage solutions. SATA drives are not as reliable as FC or SAS drives, but they have proven to be "good enough" for many applications. The ability to use RAID 6 so that two disk failures do not cause a problem if a rebuild occurs before a third disk fails makes the reliability question moot.

Conclusions

Fusion-io has gone against conventional wisdom by introducing an enterprise-class storage device based on less expensive MLC technology, and now with SMLC, is producing a higher-endurance drive with equal reliability and competitive performance at a price point between that of their SLC and MLC-based drives.  In doing so, the company hopes to replicate the success of the two earlier examples we cited: mirroring and SATA. If Fusion-IO's SMLC offerings are successful, the company should be able to accelerate the adoption rate of SSD technology. While competitors are likely to eventually catch up, eroding Fusion-io's competitive advantage, the resultant SSD price war can only be to the benefit of enterprise customers.

Jim Handy is Directors with Objective Analysis.