STEC Press Release; investors fooled by IOPS malarky?
Splashed all over the financial news sites last week was a STEC Press Release that says:
"The integration in IBM's Power 595 system, which deploys six STEC ZeusIOPS Solid State Drives (SSDs) within each expansion drawer, achieves an unprecedented 300,993.85 SPC-1 IOPS".
Ok...investors read this and see six STEC SSDs doing 301K IOPS -- 50,000K IOPS per SSD. This aligns quite well (and just oh-so-conveniently) with the numbers STEC states in it's SEC filings: 80,000 IOPS (read) and 40,000 IOPS (write).
Naturally, even sophisticated investors conclude that STEC's performance claims vs. HDD are now validated. Therefore STEC SSDs really ARE worth $13,000 each because $13K/50KIOPS equals a measley 26 pennies per IOP. Since even the best cost/IOP HDDs ring in at somewhere around $1/IOP, STEC's entire market premise is confirmed. STEC investors keep their STEC shares, and probably buy more.
-- Problem is, it required EIGHTY-FOUR SSDs in the test, not six, to get 300K IOPS.
-- Problem is, each STEC SSD only does 3,580 IOPS, about 1/14th of claimed IOPS
-- Problem is, STEC cost per IOP is $13K/3.6K = $3.77/IOP -- not better than HDD,
but many times WORSE than HDD.
Of course, if a STEC investor saw THESE numbers, they might conclude that they should dump STEC now.
Funny thing. STEC's cofounders, the CEO and COO dumped a quarter-billion of their STEC in August.
http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/2567186/