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Can Anyone Challenge STEC?: Page 2 of 2

just about every array vendor targeting the enterprise or high performance midrange market has integrated the ZEUS iops into their arrays. Do Dell Equallogic and Pillar have a better RAID approach to STEC's SLED? If not where's the second source?
Howard Marks
August 03, 2009

In fact a Dell Equallogic and Pillar are using Samsung and
Intel SSDs respectively and selling them a whole shelf at a time.  Since both vendors build the RAID controller
they can work around the limitations of the SATA interfaces these lower cost devices
use by directly connecting each device to the controller without the loops or
other FC conversion midrange or high end arrays have to use. As a result they
can deliver 20K IOPS to applications at a price their mid market customers can
afford.

Using 12 or 16 64GB SSDs rather than a few 73GB STECs they
also minimize the amount of application tuning users have to do to take
advantage of SSDs. Rather than analyze who the heavy email users are and moving
them to a 20GB Exchange information store on expensive SSDs you could just move
all 300GB of Exchange data to an SSD shelf.

From where I sit it looks like the original RAID vs. SLED
(single large expensive drive) argument all over again. Well we know who won
that one.

What do you think? Should EMC offer this class device in
Clariions?

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