"It will be interesting to see what HPE does with the OmniCube data reduction FPGA, with the potential there for a combined 3PAR+OmniCube ASIC."
Why not just cram it into their RAID adapters? But then they couldn't charge ridiculous premiums on special-purpose drive arrays. The only thing I see that Simplivity actually does is some fancy de-duplication and compression bits. And all that savings is pissed away with the mark-up on the hardware and the licensing bullshit.
For the last few years, I've forgone expensive arrays and went with some cheap SuperMicro 24-bay boxes, filled it with high speed / low capacity 120-GB SSDs, throw in a couple of LSI / Avago -4i4e cards with the battery backup and SSD cache modules turned on, and then stuck a 90-bay/4u JBOD array onto the back filled with 4 TB SATA disks. Comes out a hell of a lot cheaper than the Simplivity boxes I tried out, even performs better than them too. Also tested them against a bunch of the other storage boxes as well, like NetApp's and EMC's offerings. And with recent price drops, I've been able to use 240 GB SSDs and 8 TB spinning rust for a total of 4 TB of ridiculously fast cache and 600 TB of still pretty damn fast storage (Hard drives may be slow, but when you have 90 or them, it all adds up pretty quickly). At this point, the bottleneck is the PCIe bus coming off the processors...