Have a look at this news report from Barrons.com on their Tech Trader site.  STEC shares lost a whopping 36% as quoted in the article and in fact were down almost 39% for the day.  So have solid state drives lost their sparkle?

Barrons also wrote the day before on the STEC earnings call.  The interesting parts are (a) EMC, who take 90% of all STEC drives, aren’t selling as many as they expected (b) other vendors (notably IBM and Sun) aren’t doing well with SSD either.  So what’s the problem here?

For STEC the problem is clear – reduced demand and increased competition,  but that doesn’t answer the question of what’s going on with the wider market.

Opinion

SSDs are expensive.  SSD integration in most arrays is clunky, being a simple substitute for a standard drive.  I also believe that many customers are struggling to identify use cases for solid state drives and have no easy way to measure and justify the potential performance improvements – other than to install the drives and see what happens.  “Buy and Try” isn’t exactly a scientific approach.

Although it will eventually happen, I think the death of the fibre channel drive isn’t about to happen for some time.

© Chris for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Enterprise Computing: Is the Solid State Drive Hype Over?
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