Event / EMC World

Flash in storage, spin-down drives and cloud computing

At its annual event, the storage major endorsed flash memory, announced eco-friendly spin-down drive technology and proclaimed its support for Cloud Computing

Dave Donatelli, President, EMC Storage Division said, “Flash is going to significantly change the way storage products are designed.” With that, the company’s avowal of flash as the next big thing in storage had begun. Donatelli continued, “A 73/146 GB SSD weighs tremendously less [than a comparable hard disk drive]. The actual shipping performance is incredible in terms of total IOPS and response time. Replacing the fastest hard drive in a DMX array with a flash-based drive, results in a 30x improvement in IOPS.” He cited more statistics to bolster his argument. In a hard drive, response time goes up over time and is never better than 6 ms. Flash, on the other hand, offers response times of 1 ms or below and to sweeten the deal power consumption is 38% lower.

“Today we see flash drives in mission critical disk contention applications with five to ten drives per system. Flash is coming down in price and it is doing so much faster than HDD technology. By 2010 there will be price parity with high-speed, fiber channel HDDs,” said Donatelli.

He conceded that, “ATA drives will be around. They will continue to become very dense and offer incredible power/performance.”

Joe Tucci, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, EMC proclaimed that, “Flash technology will change the industry.”

That wasn’t the only news at EMC World. The company had other technologies to talk about including deduplication and green spin-down disk technology. “Deduplication is going to exist all over your business,” claimed Donatelli.

Talking about EMC’s attempt at going green, he said, “Features like spin down deserve to be on mainstream products. To begin with, they’ll go into disk libraries and over time they will appear in other products.”

Donatelli said, “We are in the Golden Age of storage innovation.”

On the technology trail, Tucci talked about EMC’s fifth division called Cloud Computing Infrastructure and Services. He announced that, “Cloud computing is its own division and we are expecting pretty rapid growth from it in years to come. Info-centric computing is the next wave. Today information is trapped in devices and applications. Tomorrow we will use and manage information across all these silos. Today policies are applied haphazardly. Tomorrow there will be common policies and safeguards.”

Tucci also commented that, “Five nines are not enough.” He argued that companies needed software for recovery and that restoring data from tape was too slow. “In the next two years all recovery will be from disc. Tape will be used for deep archiving,” he said.

Howard Elias, President, EMC Global Services & Resource Management Software Group said, “There’s too much friction between information and users who want to consume it.” He was highlighting the virtues of the company’s Control Center product line where the accent is on ‘seeing’ through virtual environments to physical devices. Elias highlighted the fact that 70% of compliance issues and outages are caused by a change in configuration and that 30% of IT infrastructure remains undiscovered. (Source: EMC survey of 500 customers). He said, “The single most expensive part of a migration is discovery.”

By the time EMC World ended, some things were clear as crystal. The company continues to be focused on storage but it’s definition of what constitutes storage is pretty broad which is why you find it moving into areas like cloud computing where resources exist in the cloud rather than on a company’s PCs and servers or even its storage boxes.