"Storagezilla" (aka Mark Twomey) is one of the many EMC bloggers and the other day he wrote an entry on his blog questioning where HP is with solid state technology, accusing HP of FUD.  I'm guessing either EMC has talking points or he was reading Chuck Hollis' recent comments because it's the same recycled conversation that we've had before on this blog.  Mark mis-characterized and misrepresented our position on solid state technology. EMC management made some silly predictions about when solid state drives will surpass disk drive shipments. My concern is that EMC certainly created a buzz around solid state technology but let's get real for a minute:

• HP ships more drives today than anyone - over 45% of ALL disk drives shipped to an end user is shipped by HP.
• HP will ship more solid state technology (including SSD's) I'm guessing in our first three months than EMC will ship in a year or more.
• How many TB's of solid state technology will EMC ship in laptops, desktops, servers, and blades. Zero, zilch, nada, zippo.
• Mark makes a comment that the future has arrived and suggests that vendors like HP are somehow behind.  He's right - the future has arrived and customers will look to HP for solid state not just in an array but from the desktop to the data center.
• Mark also has made predictions of HP not shipping for "a year, maybe two".  This is really FUD and is off by a factor of well, lets just say a lot.

So I congratulate EMC on creating the buzz but for customers' sake, how about just keeping it real.  I'd point our readers to a couple of posts by Jieming Zhu (from our StorageWorks office of the CTO).  Here are links to those posts: Part 1 and Part 2.