Data in a flash
Enterprise data storage giant EMC has become the first company of its type to offer solid state drives (SSDs) as part of its core product portfolio. The faster response times and lower power requirements of SSDs compared hard disk drives (HDDs) mean that they are desirable for those requiring ultra-high performance.
The SSDs will be made available in EMC’s Symmetrix DMX-4 system. EMC claims that in a storage array, flash drives can store a terabyte of data using 38 per cent 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 at The Enterprise Strategy Group. “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.”
EMC plans to offer the flash drives later this quarter in capacities of 73 GB and 146 GB.
