EMC Introduces Enterprise SSD Drives

EMC Introduces Enterprise SSD Drives

By Greg McNevin

January 15, 2008: EMC is set to shake up the enterprise storage market after becoming the first vendor to integrate flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) into its core products.

After a year-long stint of testing, EMC’s Symmetrix DMX-4 storage system will soon be available with 73 or 146GB SSDs, making it the only enterprise storage system on the market to make use of a technology some commentators claimed was still three years away from prime time.

EMC says its SSDs make use of single-layer cell (SLC) flash technology combined with sophisticated controllers to achieve ultra fast read/write performance, high reliability and data integrity. And because there are no mechanical components in flash drives, they chew through far less power than traditional hard drives.

In a storage array for example, EMC claims flash drives can store a terabyte of data using 38 percent less energy than traditional mechanical disk drives, and deliver performance that could only be matched by 30 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel disk drives. The company says this translates into a 98 percent reduction in power consumption in a transaction-per-second comparison.

While performance, robustness and power saving properties make flash drives highly attractive, the fact that they can cost 30 times more than normal enterprise drives is a potent barrier. With the DMX-4, however, EMC claims that the addition of SSD technology will only add 10 percent to the cost of a normal HDD system.

“For years, magnetic disk drive technology has defined performance boundaries for customers’ mission critical storage environments,” said David Donatelli, President, EMC Storage Division. “With this announcement, EMC has again revolutionised the storage industry.”

EMC plans to offer flash drives in 73 GB and 146 GB capacities for the Symmetrix DMX-4 platform later on in Q1 2008.

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