The Register had an interview with Mark Moshayedi, the CEO of flash pioneer STEC. He talked about the company's current strategies and pointed out that the company had saved millions by developing its own caching software. Moshayedi says STEC spent $6 million to develop its Enhanced IO caching software, a bargain compared to the money that its competitors shelved out to buy in their caching technology.
Full details over here.
Of course the flash business wasn't always a battle: once upon a time, STEC reigned supreme with its ZeusIOPS Fibre Channel drive. But now there are dozens of suppliers and multiple formats and STEC is slugging it out with rest of them in the enterprise SSD scrapfest, hoping for the good times to return.
Recalling the end of the salad days, when STEC was the sole supplier of Fibre Channel SSDs for EMC and other customers, Moshayedi said: "It took our competitors until late 2011 to produce a second supplier. There was Samsung with a SATA SSD behind an Emulex FC bridge and Hitachi GST got its FC drive qualified."
