EMC announced Flash Drives on January the 14th 2008, the company has built a customer base and has been shipping product for a while now.
There is real demand for Enterprise FLASH Drives, every quarter EMC sells more of them and adds even more EFD customers.
So while reading through HPs latest web page, filled with the "careful now" and "down with that sort of thing" language you'd expect from someone caught off balance it hit home to me how after all these months competitors are still trying to get their story straight.
Since January 2008 it's been a litany of excuses from everyone and anyone you care to mention.
It was the same across the board, there was disbelief, denunciation and talk that none of this shouldn't happen for a few years. Then there was a pause and in short order some poor unprepared sap was thrown out in front of the press, named as their FLASH "expert" and was then sent around the place with a PowerPoint deck to explain why everyone should wait for them to ship. Allegedly they were working on something "really cool" which would change everything. Allegedly.
The small print of course being that whatever they were working on wouldn't ship for a year. Or two..maybe.
You read them all and they all have an opinion on what should be done and how it should be done, but the number of them close to shipping product?
It hasn't been as easy as a lot of them expected now has it?
I got up on the morning of the 14th pointed to the Wall Street Journal and said "The future has arrived". I look at web pages like HPs and read the same tired comments from the same tired voices in the trades covering ground EMC Research walked over back in 2006 and it shows me how right I was.
The future has arrived, it's parked outside and the meter is running. But some people would rather you not mention that and that's fine.
Because it's going to cost them.
