The hunt for the best storage service provider is on, and competition is arguably at its most rigid, especially when looking at pretenders versus the real contenders.  With mounting demand comes bombarding arguments and opinions about security and service levels of storage technologies.  These, combined the new hotness in storage, Fusion-io, became a magnet for the fiery debate between two renowned experts: Steve Duplessie and Dave Floyer. The premier provider of data-centric computing solutions, Fusion-io, has frequented headlines through issues like their route to cloud, hiring 50 top-level officials, its partnership with StoneFly and the criticism on the company’s unripe preparations for IPO.

In his recent article, Duplessie explains why he’s “bearish on Fusion-io.” He mentioned two issues: the memory and component of Fusion-io cannot compete with the bigger players and the cost of having physical servers to install its stuff. He said,

“Toshiba or Samsung or someone is going to ultimately do this and do it a ton cheaper than Fusion-io can. In 1999-ish, I joined the hottest third party memory company in IT (to start a storage business) called Clearpoint. Clearpoint went from nothing to $54M (with zero VC money) on the back of MicroVax-II memory boards (16MB for a mere $9,000 or so). The company expanded into many other lines, shot up to $80M, I think. Wall Street came running to us. Two years later, the company was toast. Why? Because Clearpoint thought the competition was the OEM–Digital or IBM etc.–but it wasn’t.”

His arguments were answered by Dave Floyer, Wikibon’s senior analyst, saying, “Fusion-io and other vendors who provide flash storage through the PCIe interface are often criticized by storage companies as having ‘no legs,’ implying that they will be taken out by larger players (either a storage company or a processor technology company) as the market matures. Storage folks in particular talk about the imperative that data should be shared across all the servers, so that the resources can be shared.” Floyer pinpoints several aspects that some pundits like Duplessie might be missing or denying themselves.

Floyer added a statement that hits home:

“Storage sucks. Sorry, but it’s the truth. Storage is painfully slow. The system is waiting for spinning, mechanical rust. This arcane approach, which has been in place for more then five decades, is forced on systems architects and application developers. Access to mechanical storage is so, so slow – measured in milliseconds. Even the use of flash storage technologies that use the ancient channel and storage protocol paradigm are still very slow compared with processor and RAM speeds.”

This intellectual warfare also attracted experts like John Pozadzides, co-host of GeekBeatTV Live with Cali Lewis to comment: "To argue against flash memory is to argue against the revolution that Steve Jobs himself started with i-devices. Every last device manufacturer, from HP to Samsung, from Dell to Hitachi, is using flash memory in 100% of their devices. This is a trend that’s not going away, and certainly spreading to the enterprise already.”

The center of the debate is whether Fusion-IO has the staying power to follow this trend through to completion, or will be eclipsed by other larger players in the field. Our founder John Furrier has been certainly bullish on Fusion-IO in the past in his editorial, as has proud new datacenter owner Facebook.

This big debate circulating around older magnetic storage technology and newer solid state storage technology is huge within the solid state storage industry. With pundits engaging in boisterous discussions, expect follow-throughs and new topics within this region to surface in no time.