Now HDS joins server flash party

Still no comment from HP

Hitachi Data Systems intends to join the server flash storage party, throwing its NAND hat into the ring to speed application I/O and increase the virtual machine population.

It is joining EMC, NetApp and possibly HP. Dell has said it is doing something too, leaving IBM as the only unknown.

Here is an HDS' statement from Ricky Gradwohl, its global PR director:

We aren’t making any announcements at this time regarding our plans to provide a server-side flash solution. However, I can tell you that we have been developing technology that we plan to bring to the market later this year that we feel will provide a more compelling solution to our customers than alternative approaches available today. The ability to provide end-to-end management of data is a key concern of our customers and will be addressed by our flash solution.

NetAppp provided a formal response to a question about its Lightning-style development. It comes from John Rollason, responsible for NetApp's EMEA solutions marketing:

We feel that flash technology has significant and evolving efficiency and performance benefits at every level of the IT stack. So, I can confirm that we are working on a solution for server-based caching. The important thing is that it will be complementary to and unified with other NetApp flash based products and ONTAP ie, it will accelerate reads for and with Flash Cache (due to its proximity to the server) - as part of a shared infrastructure. Important aspects of the strategy I can share... It will:

• allow use of any server Flash hardware;
• be supported in virtualised environments;
• support end-to-end coherency – to avoid potential data corruption in the cache;
• have a high enough capacity to accommodate larger application working sets; and
• support multiple protocols.

In a different style we received an answer from an HP world-wide PR spokesperson to our question about it producing server flash memory for its coming Gen8 servers and here it is:

Any comments or content regarding HP’s server or storage roadmap beyond what has already been made public are nothing more than rumor or speculation, which HP does not comment on.

Glorious stuff. ®