EMC: Flash to dominate high-end storage

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Flash technology has the potential to dominate the high-end storage market, EMC bosses said at their annual conference in Las Vegas.

A day which saw the announcement of a range of new backup products also saw confident predictions from top EMC executives that flash could change the high-end storage market due to falling prices and better performance than rotating drives.

David Donatelli, executive vice president of EMC Product Operations, said that the I/O and response times of flash drives were far superior then that of the fastest fibre channel rotating drives, and that by the end of the decade they will achieve price parity.

Disk drives were judged on performance in two ways - I/O and response times (how fast it was from when you hit the button to get your data back). Donatelli revealed that the flash drives supplied by EMC had I/O speeds 30 times faster than standard fibre channel hard drives. Response times were at millisecond or less, compared to six milliseconds for a rotating drive.

"It's pretty significant, because we are reaching the limit of what fibre channel rotating drives can do," Donatelli said.

He also said that from a reliability perspective, flash was better because it didn't have any rotating parts.

Donatelli said: "If you're looking on about going forward, flash technology is coming down in cost fast and it's our goal to drive down the cost of technology as fast as we can."

"The cost of flash technology is coming down much faster than spinning disk drives," he added.

He made the prediction that a much higher percentage of EMC's customers' systems would contain flash.

"When we get together in two or three years you are going to see completely different storage than we have today, and that's why we think it is such a big change."

EMC's chairman, president and chief operating officer Joe Tucci was slightly less confident, saying that he doubted that revenue from flash technology would ever surpass that of rotating hard drives as it was more suited for the high-end storage market.

However, he was in agreement that when prices came down, it had the potential to be a dominant force.

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