EMC Unveils VFCache; Fusion-IO CEO Slams SAN Ambition

Shares of EMC (EMC) are down 22 cents, or 0.9%, at $26.17 after the company this morning unveiled what it calls “VFCache,” formerly called “Project Lightning,” a plug-in board for servers that speeds up fetching of data from storage arrays by as much as 4,000 times by caching data locally, the company said.

EMC plans to add to the benefits of VFCache with a product called “Project Thunder,” it said. That is a server “appliance” that also uses flash memory chips to accelerate response time when fetching data.

EMC’s announcement reflects, perhaps, some progress made by Fusion-IO (FIO), the seven-year-old startup from Salt Lake City that has been selling what it describes as in some sense a “graphics processing unit,” or GPU, for data access, that’s plugged into servers sold by partners such as International Business Machines (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and Dell (DELL).

Which is interesting, because Fusion-IO’s CEO, David Flynn, took some time on Friday to put in a call to me, to discuss what he sees as the “extortion” of IT by EMC, and to generally talk down this latest offering by the company. (He seems to have called a lot of other journalists as well, I would note, and was on CNBC today. I guess he felt quite moved to discuss the EMC news.)

Flynn points out that since EMC started putting flash chips in its storage arrays, nevertheless, “We’ve outsold EMC in terms of total capacity of flash sold into the market.”

Flynn argues that the VFCache is EMC’s desperate bid to avoid the fact that the “SAN for performance is dead,” by which Flynn means that storage networks can no longer keep up with the demands for data that are hitting the server. He deems that to be more and more the case as hosted software such as the kind Salesforce.com (CRM) sells becomes the main�driver of data center spending.

“They are like Burroughs at the end of the mainframe era,” quipped Flynn, referring to the maker of tabulating equipment bought out by Unisys (UIS), “trying to make a smarter terminal as the PC era comes along.”

Flynn further argues that having to buy less-efficient “SLC” flash chips (as opposed to the “MLC” flavor that Fusion uses), EMC then has to add on added expense for memory controller chips from vendors such as LSI (LSI). All that, he says, adds up to a premium for EMC’s product.

“They’re charging $50 per gig [of data] while we’re at $10 per gig.”