only thing "booming" is the STEC bubble -- like the Hindenburg
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2009/11/04/stec-crushed-by-emc-issue-three-bullish-analysts-give-up/
Chris...if those profits were posted against revenue that STEC knew was unlikely to sell through, it's called "channel stuffing". This potentially benefitted both STEC and EMC.
Shortly after booking these orders (July?), the Moshayedi brothers (CEO and COO) sold off a quarter-billion or more at the peak of the SSD-hype frenzy.
But in April of this year, Microsoft researchers in Cambridge UK did the math to show that even at prices about 1/10th what ZeusIOPS costs, there's still no business case for replacing spinning disks with Flash -- in fact the ROI isn't just non-existent...it's negative. You can bet that STEC and EMC saw this research...
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1519081
It's NOT JUST STEC -- the whole SSD thing is a house of cards...here's IBM's top storage research guy out of the Almaden Research group...Dr. Steven Hetzler -- from December of 2008. Of course nobody wanted to listen back then...
http://www.idema.org/_smartsite/modules/local/data_file/show_file.php?cmd=download&data_file_id=2007
Bring on the lawsuits!!!