The datacenter is an ever-changing thing, striving for efficiency.  One notable shift is now taking place in flash, where innovative startups like Fusion-io are at risk of losing their lead now that industry giants like EMC have validated flash with viable solutions of their own.  Dubbed the Flash Wars, what do these developments mean for the industry at large?

Wikibon’s Dave Vellante and David Floyer examined the recent flash storage announcements from EMC, proving detailed analysis on the new products and what they mean across the board.  The two experts shared their insights in a 26-minute long feature episode that can be viewed on our channel here (full video below).

EMC does right by XtremIO buy

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Vellante kicked off the broadcast with a brief overview of what flash is about, and how it made it from consumer devices to the enterprise. The ball then passed to Floyer, who addressed a recent article that referenced one of his reports and wrongly assumed that he believes EMC’s new hardware is “more bark than bite.”

Floyer believes the exact opposite. The CTO described the news as “very solid announcements,” and even made a prediction that the XtremIO all-flash array will perform exceedingly well in spite the fact it lacks some of the “bells and whistles that are gonna be required for full enterprise adoption.”

Overall, XtremIO packs a lot of bite. Floyer deems it a “solid implementation.”

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Later in the discussion, Vellante brought up an EMC benchmark that claims its PCIe cards, which were announced together with XtremIO, outperform Fusion-io’s ioDrive PCIe cards. Floyer responded by saying that the test is undoubtedly reliable, but added that real-life performance is likely less impressive than the the results the cards delivered in a prepared environment.

Besides the settings, another factor that the benchmark left out is software. The patented software that powers Fusion-io’s drives allows for Atomic Writes, which Vellante describes as operations that “directly write to the memory, bypassing disk protocols,” thus “delivering up to four orders of magnitude performance.”

He follows up the explanation with a question: can EMC and others do Atomic Writes?  Floyer says yes, and notes that several companies are already working on developing their own version of Fusion-io’s software.