Fusion-io CEO: Storage Heading For Commoditisation

If they don’t have the expertise, why do you think EMC decided to do it on their own rather than just use an OEM partner in an overall solution?
The reason why is because Fusion-io has positioned itself as a competitor to them because our vision is that flash catalyses the storage market and shifts it from proprietary and centralised to a distributed client/server open model, the same as what the microprocessor did to computing.

So what happens to the storage market now, as it’s not just EMC we’re really talking about here?
When people say Fusion-io is at risk of being commoditised, I say ‘dude, if we’re commoditised, heaven forbid the whole storage market [has been commoditised]. Because that’s what gets commoditised first. Capacity becomes much cheaper when you don’t have the performance requirement coupled with it.

Storage had been somewhat immune to commoditisation because it was the bottleneck. You consolidated all your servers, you consolidated all your management, but your storage explodes.

But what about in huge data centres where storage is still hugely valued and there’s tonnes of boxes storing data?
That’s the interesting thing, the huge scale-out guys didn’t use storage mainframes. The move towards an open scale-out model was already underway before flash because the proprietary model is too expensive. Did Facebook use SANs? No, that would be absurd.

The scale-out guys have avoided mainframes from the beginning. Flash allows them to get the full utilisation because before they had to make the trade off. If you’re using open source it doesn’t matter if your processors are mostly idle, you just package your disks in a commodity server and even if those aren’t enough to feed the server processor, you just put in a bunch of those. If you’re paying for Oracle, the last thing you want is that license to go under utilised, so you put a lot of memory in the system and you put a big SAN behind it.

The primary difference between the scale-up world, with SANs and big fat servers, and the scale-out world is whether you’re paying for software, because if the data supply is constrained, scaling out only works if the software is free and you’re not having to pay the licensing. If you paying for the software, you’re going to scale it up and you’re paying a premium for the storage array and big memory.

With flash, you can supply data fast enough that you can take commercial software when you’re doing the scale-out and you can take the scale out methods and do them in the scale up world. It actually represents a collision of scale out and scale up.

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