EMC’s Project Lightning Provokes Fusion-io Reaction
There have been a number of different speculations about Project Lightning ever since EMC’s most senior executives hinted towards an upcoming offering at last year’s EMC World. Wikibon’s Dave Vellante dug into the history of the project, its background and its maker’s vision (among other things) in a blog post that went out on February 3rd, and the official announcement hit two days later. Project Lightning is all about Flash.
Storage giant EMC is hoping to take on this market, dominated by companies such as Fusion-io, with VFCache – the PCIe flash card that grabbed all the attention under the more informal name given to it whole it was still in development. The concept is focusing on the performance boost to be gained by installing it in legacy servers. Based on early reports, VFCache has managed to justify a portion of the hype: a threefold increase in speed was measured in an Oracle environment, along with a 50 percent reduction in latency.
Project Lightning has been on the blogosphere’s radar ever since it was first revealed, and VFCache is being discussed even more intently ever since the actual details were unveiled this week. SiliconANGLE and Wikibon have been covering it regularly the whole time, including the chat with EMC president and COO Pat Glesinger about his company’s new product.
The competition had something to say about the debut as well. Fusion-io is the biggest player in the flash industry, and CEO/chairman David Flynn is adamant that will remain to be the case even after EMC’s entry into the market.
“EMC’s introduction of a product that leverages flash only as a cache for expensive backend EMC storage systems is a limited approach to solving the growing data supply problem in modern data centers.” Flynn said.” In contrast, Fusion-io achieves application performance through the use of flash as a memory platform in the server. We believe ours is the optimal approach to maximizing data center efficiency and performance needs that increase in importance with the continued adoption of cloud computing. Customers don’t want to pay twice for reliable performance, and they don’t have to with Fusion-io.”
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