Fusion-io, Inc. Technology Update Conference (Transcript)

And this is where Fusion-io does not agree, because when you put flash in the server, well, first you have to realize for a traditional storage vendor when they provide more performance, they have to charge more, otherwise it turns the world upside down if the performance costs less than from the storage system. So if you look at how vendors are pricing their server-side flash, they are actually charging considerably more than the flash that they put in the storage array.

But that is their choice to do so, because they don't want to cannibalize their own market. Because if you look at it, the fact that you don't require storage networking when you put it in the server, you don't need a separate box to connect to and it's not a proprietary system that has those additional mark-ups. Look at how much of Seagate drive costs. When that Seagate drive is in the server, it's not nearly as expensive as when the Seagate drive is in a storage array. You're going to pay two times, three times, four times as much for that same drive. So the closed system architecture makes it more expensive. So this is really the structural pricing of the flash deployment options.

Now what happens though when you look at that is it changes the market size picture considerably. There are 10 million servers expected to shift in 2012. There are only 100,000 storage arrays from the largest storage vendor expected to ship in 2012. So when we look at the market size, 10 million servers versus 100,000 storage arrays. What you realize is that now this is much more congruent. Flash in the storage array is much more expensive and will be used much more sparingly than flash in the servers and there's a lot more opportunity for flash in the server.

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