EMC adds Flash (SSD) to product line Energy Efficiency

EMC adds flash-based solid state drives to its products lines.  Energy efficiency performance is their main selling points.

 

   

Because there are no mechanical components in flash drives, they require less power. In a storage array, flash drives can store a terabyte of data using 38 percent less energy than traditional mechanical disk drives. It would take 30 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel disk drives to deliver the same performance as a single flash drive, which translates into a dramatic 98 percent reduction in power consumption in a transaction-per-second comparison.

   

“For years, magnetic disk drive technology has defined performance boundaries for customers’ mission critical storage environments,” said David Donatelli, President, EMC Storage Division. “With this announcement, EMC has again revolutionized the storage industry. The introduction of flash drive technology builds on EMC’s long history of storage industry firsts, including the pioneering use of small form factor disk drives and ATA disk drives in enterprise storage systems. Then as now, EMC is helping customers gain a competitive advantage and tackle information challenges that no other vendor’s technology can.”

 

It's great to see EMC market this feature. I've been talking to some storage architects who have been looking at flash for performance, and telling them the opportunity is huge in that not only is it fast, but it is energy efficient which is key for a green data center.  Changes in storage systems are going to see some of the biggest changes in energy efficiency for 2008 as the rest of the industry focuses on storage power consumption.