SSD will change face of industry

Solid state disks (SSD) will be the biggest change in the industry as long as the price continues to drop.

That's the opinion of Joe Tucci, chairman and chief executive of EMC, who gave the first key note speech at EMC World in Orlando, Florida in May 2009.

He said: “What's hot in storage right now? SSD. Flash will dominate for the foreseeable future and this will totally change the game in arrays. Obviously for this to work we need the prices to come down.”

We all know this is what is holding back SSD but Tucci showed figures that make it look like the price really is improving.

He said: “When we first launched SSD in the first quarter of 2008 it was 30 times faster but 40 times more expensive. If you fast forward one year the prices have come down by 76 per cent. It will continue to drop and if you look at the inherent benefits... it is just going to change the landscape.”

Solid state flash drives utilize flash memory to store and retrieve data, yielding response times that are an order of magnitude faster than the fastest hard disk drives and require dramatically less power to run.

The flash drives for the Symmetrix DMX-4 system have been purpose built to EMC’s exacting specifications and use single-layer cell (SLC) flash technology combined with sophisticated controllers to achieve ultra fast read/write performance, high reliability and data integrity. They have been tested and qualified to withstand the intense workloads of high-end enterprise storage applications. Continuing a pace of innovation that has made Symmetrix the market-leading enterprise storage platform for more than a decade, EMC has further optimized the Symmetrix DMX-4 operating software to take advantage of the full power and value that flash storage technology brings to high-performance storage environments, including the ability to easily provision, manage, replicate and move data between flash drives and traditional Fibre Channel and SATA disk drives in the same array.

Because there are no mechanical components in flash drives, they require less power. In a storage array, flash drives can store a terabyte of data using 38 percent less energy than traditional mechanical disk drives. It would take 30 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel disk drives to deliver the same performance as a single flash drive, which translates into a dramatic 98 percent reduction in power consumption in a transaction-per-second comparison.

“EMC is the first enterprise infrastructure player to incorporate flash disk into their arrays, which should give them a huge performance advantage at the very sector of the market that always seems to need more and more,” said Steve Duplessie, Senior Analyst, The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. “If it creates as big a gap in real life transaction processing shops as it does on paper, this could very well be one of those killer advantages that only appear every 10 to 15 years.”

Flash storage technology is ideally suited to support applications that need to process massive amounts of information very quickly, such as currency exchange and electronic trading systems, real-time data feed processing, mainframe transaction processing, and many others. Storage systems with enterprise-class flash drives can deliver single-millisecond application response times, up to 10 times faster than those with traditional 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel disk drives. With flash drive technology in a Symmetrix DMX-4 storage system, a credit card provider, for example, could process its fraud detection information more quickly, clearing up to six times more transactions in the same amount of time it took to previously process a single transaction.

This new solid-state storage tier, “tier zero,” is fully supported by the Symmetrix software management suite, enabling storage administrators to simplify the provisioning of all of their storage tiers with advanced management tools including Dynamic Cache Partitioning, Virtual LUNs, Quality of Service Manager, and now Virtual Provisioning (see separate press release for details) to simplify overall management and application performance.

With new support for one terabyte SATA II disk drives on Symmetrix DMX-4 systems, EMC is further improving storage density while enhancing energy efficiency (see separate press release for details). The Symmetrix DMX-4, with support for flash drives, Fibre Channel disk drives and SATA disk drives, offers the broadest range of ‘in the box’ storage tiering options to enable the consolidation of all application tiers within a single system. By aligning data availability, service level requirements and software functionality with capacity and cost considerations through tiered storage, Symmetrix DMX-4 delivers the best performance, resiliency and energy efficiency available in the industry today.

For years, magnetic disk drive technology has defined performance boundaries for customers’ mission critical storage environments, with this announcement, EMC has again revolutionized the storage industry. The introduction of flash drive technology builds on EMC’s long history of storage industry firsts, including the pioneering use of small form factor disk drives and ATA disk drives in enterprise storage systems. Then as now, EMC is helping customers gain a competitive advantage and tackle information challenges that no other vendor’s technology can.