EMC has been hinting at a project called “Thunder” for a while now, and at EMC World yesterday they started to unwrap the package a bit more. Unlike the recent XtremIO acquisition that we discussed in our earlier entry, Thunder is an SSD Appliance, designed to be heavy on performance and light on data services.

It looks like Thunder will use multiple, highly customized PCIe SSD cards packaged into a custom-designed appliance. One of the key deliverables to the customized PCIe interface will be hot swap-ability and ease-of-access. Instead of opening a server up to install or upgrade an internal PCIe SSD, Thunder will have an external eject type of mechanism.

It seems like Thunder is clearly designed to be direct attached to a server. There was no indication of sharing capabilities, although EMC could easily add that to the appliance if demand warrants it. Thunder will be positioned as the upgrade to PCIe based SSD solutions like their own VFCache. Internal PCIe SSD solutions, while very cost effective, are limited in their ability to provide high availability and high capacity. Thunder will address environments where those two issues are a concern.

Direct competitors for Thunder are going to be Violin Memory Systems and Texas Memory Systems. It appears at this point that both of these companies will have an advantage in density (capacity per rack unit) and, at least in the case of Texas Memory, an advantage in native share-ability.

Where EMC clearly has an advantage is in its deployment of FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering). It’s reasonable to assume that FAST will support Thunder and be able to move active data to the device as needed.

EMC has assembled one of the broadest lineups of solid state technologies available today. They can add SSD to their existing storage systems, they can add SSD inside of a server, they recently acquired an All-Flash Storage System (XtremIO) and now Thunder will provide a large SSD appliance to attach externally to a server.

Each of these SSD solution types has a role to play, but EMC is unique in having them all. The key for EMC is learning to understand when to apply the right SSD technology to each storage performance problem. They will have competition as they try to solve these problems but that competition will likely come from a variety of smaller vendors and the cast will change with each challenge.

EMC is a client of Storage Switzerland

previous entry: “Dissecting XtremIO”