"If Vellante's right it looks like this is going to be a strongly contested market." . Chris, I would agree that it will be/is so, but would also add that it is also a mine field, which is also a mind field, and whoever it laying the mines is leading the markets/inventing the field.

Hmm I dont see this as a simple use SSD or spinning disk. There is a vast expanse of existing disk farms that need accelerating. Whilst the busiest spindles could be replaced with SSD, this will likely shift the IO bottleneck elsewhere. I believe there is a gap for a transparent cache layer of SSDs. This will look very much like array cache, but it would be much larger and easily scalable (& targeted). By using a SSD cache layer, the high capacities of spinning disk can be leveraged with the speed of SDD. this could be done now!!!