Lighten Up, Francis

One of the challenges we've faced at FlashSoft is that because we do something new, we don't fit cleanly into a standard product category. We're really obsessed with Flash SSD, but we don't sell SSDs. (Many of our partners do.) We enable Flash SSDs to increase IO performance, which is something you'll find in some high-end storage appliances, but our software is for servers.

We think Flash memory belongs in the server tier, but we also think that using Flash as direct-attached storage is often not economical or practical. It's not economical because not all of your data needs to be on Flash. A lot of your IO would be just as fast in HDD read/write operations. And direct-attached Flash storage isn't practical if the performance gains mean giving up the benefits of a storage infrastructure that you're happy with.

That's why we say Flash SSD is best used for caching hot IO, to reduce latency and increase server performance without changes to underlying storage. In fact, caching hot data in the server will improve the performance of your storage.

But now and then, we get lumped in the "storage" category. Which is kind of odd. Remember, we don't even sell any hardware (*our partners* do). So please, as Conrad Dunn might have said, "Don't call me storage."