Its going to be very interesting on a couple different fronts. Can they manufacture their own drives at a price point where they can be cost competitive in the market? Does development now slow down with proprietary HW (ala 3PAR ASIC)? Finally, the DSSD, Violin's of the world that used proprietary HW did NOT offer any data services (Dedupe, Compression) because that inherently slows the array down. Did they fail because of the HW or because of the lack of services?
