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The Elephant, The Blind Men And Fusion IO: Page 2 of 2

Last week, Enterprise Strategy Group's Steve Duplessie opened a real can of worms with his blog post "Why I'm Bearish on Fusion IO." By questioning Fusion IO's prospects, Steve insulted the popular girl at the prom, and several other industry observers played the role of the football team coming to Fusion IO's defense, with blog posts like "What Storage Folks Don't Get About FusionIO" and "Steve Duplessie Hates Fusion IO". Of course, all of this chatter is in response to Fusion IO's filing for
Howard Marks
May 03, 2011

The whole affair reminds me of the parable of the elephant and the blind men. One felt the side and thought it was a wall; the second felt a leg and thought it was a tree; the third interpreted the trunk as a snake.

With his enterprise focus, Steve looks at Fusion IO and sees a niche product that addresses I/O latency if, and only if, that problem can be addressed within a single server. The Web 2.0 guys see a broader solution. The problem is that the NoSQL Hadoop world lives with "eventual consistency"--it doesn't really matter if different Facebook users on different nodes see drunken frat boy photos a few minutes apart. The corporate world, however, requires consistent data. If I place an order at Amazon and the website says the item is in stock, it had better actually ship today.

Once again, the old horse player's motto applies "Different horses for different courses."

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