Tomorrow at noon EST (9:00 A.M. PST) the Wikibon community will convene in a Peer Incite titled “Squinting through the Glare of Project Lightning” meeting to discuss the implications of EMC’s announcement of VFCache, aka “Project Lightning”, a unique PCIe server flash card implementation intended to work with EMC storage arrays. The meeting is fee and open to interested parties and can be accessed either by dialing into the conference call or by watching the live video feed on SiliconAngle.tv. Audio and video recordings will be available online after the meeting.

VFCache is EMC’s answer to Fusion-io and other startups that have been gaining traction among online and cloud services. However, unlike their products, it is a read-only cache that stores a copy of heavily used data from the storage array onto the server, where applications can access it over the PCIe bus, reducing latency by orders of magnitude.

Unlike the Fusion-io and other competing PCIe flash products, which are flash-only systems, VFCache is designed to be integrated with EMC storage arrays, which are either all disk or hybrid disk-flash systems. And while the focus of Fusion-io has so far been on leading-edge big data analysis systems, EMC seems to be focusing on the traditional business market and specifically on its existing business customers.

The hour-long Peer Incite will be led by Wikibon CTO David Floyer and will explore the following questions:

• What is Project Lightning, and why does it matter?
• How is the storage hierarchy evolving, and where does Lightning fit relative to the competition?
• How will the role of spinning disk change as a result of flash generally and Lightning specifically?
• How should practitioners view Lightning, and what actions should they take to maximize value?

Interested parties may also subscribe to the free Peer Incite e-Newsletter, which will carry several short articles by Wikibon experts analyzing the implications of VFCache by registering on the Wikibon Web site.