The storage news these days could seemingly be published by The Onion. We have EMC and Pure Storage with dueling lawsuits, we have OCZ filing for bankruptcy, we have Violin Memory shares dropping like a rock on bad sales news – and this is just information over the last week or so. This seems like a great deal of turmoil even for our volatile industry. I am not totally surprised about each one of these, but all of them happening in such a short period of time seems like an odd coincidence.

We all know that there is lots of turmoil in the solid state drive business. The failure of OCZ is not and should not be a surprise to anyone following them, and if the rumors were true I am sure that someone at OCZ should be kicking themselves for not selling to Seagate. But this is happening about the same time that Violin Memory announced a huge loss with no end in sight. This seemed like an odd time for both of these things to come out.

The strangest one of all is the spat between EMC and Pure Storage. Sales people often change companies, and of course Pure Storage would want to get some ex-EMCers to understand customers and markets. What strikes me as very odd – even more than odd, but strange – is that the sales people are not clearly thinking things out. It is clear that the flash market is having some significant issues and that EMC has just announced products that will compete head to head with a number of flash vendors. Why jump to Pure Storage just as this is happening and right in the middle major market changes to flash? Maybe The Onion should have a section on storage. The news might make more sense there.