By Calvin Zito

I always enjoy a good laugh and thought I'd have to share this video clip I found yesterday.  But first you need the back story. 

If you've read this blog or other storage vendor blogs, you know that many have had issues with the hype EMC was trying to create around solid state drives.  In typical EMC fashion, they announced solid state technology well before they could ship them in volume (and BTW they OEM from one of the partners that HP uses for solid state drives) and then tried to claim some great innovation around being first with SSD's.  They have gone so far to rename solid state drives which in my opinion was another vain attempt at demonstrating innovation.  Chuck over at EMC went on to predict that HP would not have SSD's in the EVA until 2010 if ever (which by the way we announced in our latest announcement). He's tried to use this as a proof point for some whacked out thesis that HP is a server company and not a storage vendor.  Chuck's poking at us is all kind of ironic because he knew all along that they had a big issue with the emergence of blade servers and without a server business, EMC was in trouble.  They knew they had to to find a partner that is looking to enter the server business but didn't have a storage business (see Lee John's post titled "What constitutes brave new thinking?").  Thanks Chuck for confirming that HP's direction of having storage and servers tightly linked really does make sense.

But I'm a bit of track so let's get back to the solid state video.  I am up for a smack down any time a competitor's blog misrepresents HP or what we are doing (which is often the case with Chuck).  So with no apologies, I'll point you to this video that Marc Farley over at 3Par created when he saw a post I had left on another blog around the topic of over-hyping SSD's.  Here's the URL for Marc's post and be sure to check out the video: http://www.storagerap.com/2009/02/hp-bloggers-go-viral-with-cross-blog-smackups.html.  Yesterday was my birthday and seeing this video made my day!