EMC To Use Flash In Symmetrix Storage DevicesEMC To Use Flash In Symmetrix Storage Devices

EMC Corporation reported Monday that it will integrate flash drives in its Symmetrix DMX-4 storage system in a move it claims will improve access speeds and use 38% less energy than mechanical drives.

The innovative approach is likely to appeal to large IT shops, many of which could retrofit the flash technology.

Noting that it has tested the technology for a year, EMC said it believes the new flash drive technology represents the first such system for enterprise installations. The flash technology is supplied by component manufacturer STEC Inc., which is supplying EMC with its Zeus-IOPS drive family.

IT storage expert Steve Duplessie, a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, said as EMC's positioning in the vanguard of flash for IT installations represents a performance advantage over competitors.

"If it creates as big a gap in real life 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," he said.

EMC indicated the new flash solid state technology will appeal particularly to financial organizations that need trigger-fast access and rapid transaction processing. In a release, EMC said: "Flash storage technology is ideally suited to support applications that need to process massive amounts of information very quickly, such as currently exchange and electronic trading systems, real-time data feed processing (and) mainframe transaction processing."

The flash drive technology is supported by the Symmetrix software management suite including its Dynamic Cache partitioning, Virtual LUNs, Quality of Service Manager, as well as EMC's new Virtual Provisioning product.

STEC's Zeus-IOPS SSDs utilize the industry standard 3.5-inch hard disk form factor and provide access times measured in microseconds versus hard drive access times, which are measured in milliseconds, STEC said.

As part of the Flash announcement, EMC debuted its Virtual Provisioning software, which is targeted to operate with its Symmetrix DMX technology. The combination of the two is expected to simplify and speed up the virtual and physical provisioning of storage capacity, EMC said. Virtual Provisioning assists an application to present more capacity than is physically allocated in a system.

In a related development Monday, EMC also announced IPv6 and IPsec (IP Security) support for Symmetrix DMS-4 and DMX-4 systems.