EMC releases new flash drives

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EMC has announced the release of new, larger-capacity, second-generation Enterprise Flash drives for its EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 storage systems.

The new 200GB and 400GB Enterprise Flash drives are available immediately and will provide support for applications requiring “consistent, ultra-fast performance, maximum utilisation and the highest levels of reliability”.

Barbara Robidoux, EMC's vice president of storage marketing, said: “It is clear that enterprise flash drives are revolutionising the way information is stored and EMC is leading the charge.”

She added: “Customer demand for Enterprise Flash drives has exceeded expectations and we are seeing a wide range of deployment scenarios at sites around the world. Whether they are part of Symmetrix, CLARiiON or Celerra systems, flash is becoming a key part of information infrastructures of all types and sizes.”

The firm stated that as enterprise flash drives have become more popular and drive capacity has increased, the cost-per-gigabyte compared to traditional fibre channel disk drives has been reduced by 76 per cent over the past year.

This in turn enabled one fully utilised flash drive to deliver the same performance as numerous intentionally underutilised mechanical drives. By reducing the overall number of drives in a system, power consumption-per-transaction can be reduced by up to 98 per cent.

“Flash drives have two major customer benefits, reducing storage and IT energy budgets," said David Floyer, chief technology officer at the technology research and advisory organisation Wikibon.

“They can perform hundreds of times more input/output (I/O) than traditional disks and replace large numbers of disks that are I/O constrained, and they can increase system throughput by reducing I/O response times. This means fewer actuators, fewer drives, more efficient storage controllers and more efficient servers, leading to lower storage and energy costs.”

These new larger capacity drives are available now on Symmetrix DMX-4 storage systems but will also be available on EMC CLARiiON midrange storage systems and EMC Celerra unified storage systems later in 2009.

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