04 November 2009

Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall

Our bellwether company, STEC, reported last night; and boy howdy, was it bad. Not too surprisingly, this endeavor had been predicting less than wonderful news. The share dropped to below $16 in after hours yesterday, and this morning is a bit above that number as I type. The point of this endeavor isn't stock tips, of course, but the fortunes of Real World producers of SSD is of significance to what does matter: the transition to BCNF databases on SSD multi-core/processor machines.

The accounting for the 3rd quarter was what the analysts predicted. The news that has sent the share in the toilet is the revelation (which could have been discovered earlier) that EMC, which accounts for "90%" (according to one news report) of the ZeusIOPS demand, would stretch its current stock into 1st quarter 2010. This news pretty much contradicts what had been in the wind, that EMC was taking all the STEC SSD it could get.

Not surprisingly, the emerging news and analysis boils down to: SSD isn't replacing HDD in the enterprise at warp speed after all. I will gloat here. I had mentioned in earlier posts that the transition from HDD --> SSD had already morphed to HDD --> SSD+HDD. While none of the reports have explicitly stated this as the reason that EMC has enough SSD for the time being, such would be the rosier outlook.

The less rosy outlook is that the storage system business isn't going to expand at nearly the rate a growing economy warrants. Dum da dum dum. Dum.

Truth be told, my earlier surmise, that SSD multi-machines will be adopted more by the VAR networks where they control both the software and hardware as a package, remains my conviction. The enterprise is still populated by brontosaurs.

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