EMC Unveils SSDs on Symmetrix

EMC jumped on the Solid State Disk (SSD) bandwagon today, adding the technology to its Symmetrix system in a bid to boost performance and further its "green storage" strategy.

The 3.5-inch flash memory drives, OEM'd from STEC, will be offered in addition to SATA and Fibre Channel drives within the Symmetrix DMX-4.

"You can run these flash drives as a 'tier zero' for high-performance applications," says Bob Wambach, senior director of storage product marketing at EMC, adding that 73-Gbyte and 146-Gbyte SSDs will be available later this quarter.

"We have been putting a substantial amount of effort into this over the last two years and there was a lengthy design and specification period," he told Byte and Switch. "We wanted to make sure that when these drives came over, we would have all the tiered storage software in place to support them."

Because SSDs use RAM or flash technology instead of traditional magnetic or optical media to store and access data, access speeds are typically much faster than traditional disk. Instead of 5 milliseconds for magnetic disk, SSDs can offer access speeds of as little as 20 microseconds -- eliminating I/O bottlenecking.At least one analyst thinks that offering SSDs as an additional tier of storage could be a winner. "This is one of the first times that we have seen an implementation like this from someone like EMC," says IDC research manager Jeff Januckowicz. "There has been a lot of publicity about SSDs, but it has been mainly focused on notebooks."

"By putting files that are accessed frequently on the SSDs, the performance will be much greater," adds the analyst, explaining that this could be particularly for applications that require high IOPs such as online transaction processing.

"What you're really going to see is a mixture of hard disk drives (HDDs) and SSDs in the DMX, and users are really going to tier their storage," says Januckowicz. "They are going to use the HDD piece like they did in the past, but they are also going to put a layer of SSDs in to boost the performance of the system."

Unlike traditional disk drives, there are no mechanical components within SSDs, which can reduce the amount of power needed to actually run the drives. EMC claims that flash drives, such as the ones found in the DMX-4, can store a Tbyte of data using 38 percent less energy than traditional mechanical disk drives.

Despite the benefits of SSD, IDC analyst Januckowicz warns that the technology is not ideal for every storage deployment. "Where capacity is required, traditional hard disk drives will be a much better fit," he says, alluding to the fact that SSDs are typically much more expensive than HDDs.Although neither EMC nor STEC would reveal component pricing to Byte and Switch, the price disparity between SSD and traditional disk is steep: A 1-Tbyte hard drive runs at about $550, while an SSD with the same capacity could run to more than $10,000.

EMC has not yet revealed how much users will pay for the Symmetrix SSD drives, although the technology is not likely to come cheap. Pricing for an entry-level version of the Symmetrix DMX-4 starts at $250,000, rising into the millions of dollars, depending on the configuration.

Long-term, it also seems likely that EMC will look to extend SSD technology to other parts of its portfolio. "We have a history of leveraging technology onto different platforms," says Wambach, but he would not say which products could be included. "It's reasonable to expect that when the business case makes sense, you will see flash drives on other platforms."

In addition to the SSDs, EMC also announced its version of thin provisioning, entitled "virtual provisioning" today, which it is touting as part of its Symmetrix tiered storage strategy.

Pricing for EMC's virtual provisioning software, which will be available later this quarter, is not yet available.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.