EMC release solid state enterprise drives

Pradeep

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In summary, IO performance of 30 15K drives in one 72 or 144 GB drive. And of course no need to pay the middle man (i.e. drive maker), can just get the best deals directly from the flash ram manufacturers.

That's going to be fantastic for performance. Just what we want for Exchange. Have to see what the price premium is though. With 1TB SATA drives beoming an option in lower end SANs, hopefully it won't be in the stratosphere.

Handy have you got to play with them at all?



http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/us/2008/011408-1.htm

EMC in Major Storage Performance Breakthrough; First with Enterprise-Ready Solid State Flash Drive Technology
Market-leading Symmetrix DMX Systems to Feature Newest Flash-based Technology for Unprecedented Performance and Energy Efficiency
HOPKINTON, Mass. - January 14, 2008
HOPKINTON, Mass. – January 14, 2008 – EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today became the first enterprise storage vendor to integrate flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) into its core product portfolio. Solid state flash drives utilize flash memory to store and retrieve data, yielding response times that are an order of magnitude faster than the fastest hard disk drives and require dramatically less power to run. The EMC® Symmetrix® DMX-4 storage system is the only enterprise storage system available on the market today to leverage this technology, which has been tested by EMC for the past year, to deliver ultra-high performance for mission-critical applications.

The flash drives for the Symmetrix DMX-4 system have been purpose built to EMC’s exacting specifications and use single-layer cell (SLC) flash technology combined with sophisticated controllers to achieve ultra fast read/write performance, high reliability and data integrity. They have been tested and qualified to withstand the intense workloads of high-end enterprise storage applications. Continuing a pace of innovation that has made Symmetrix the market-leading enterprise storage platform for more than a decade, EMC has further optimized the Symmetrix DMX-4 operating software to take advantage of the full power and value that flash storage technology brings to high-performance storage environments, including the ability to easily provision, manage, replicate and move data between flash drives and traditional Fibre Channel and SATA disk drives in the same array.

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.

“EMC is the first enterprise infrastructure player to incorporate flash disk into their arrays, which should give them a huge performance advantage at the very sector of the market that always seems to need more and more,” said Steve Duplessie, Senior Analyst, The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. “If it creates as big a gap in real life transaction 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.”

Flash storage technology is ideally suited to support applications that need to process massive amounts of information very quickly, such as currency exchange and electronic trading systems, real-time data feed processing, mainframe transaction processing, and many others. Storage systems with enterprise-class flash drives can deliver single-millisecond application response times, up to 10 times faster than those with traditional 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel disk drives. With flash drive technology in a Symmetrix DMX-4 storage system, a credit card provider, for example, could process its fraud detection information more quickly, clearing up to six times more transactions in the same amount of time it took to previously process a single transaction.

This new solid-state storage tier, “tier zero,” is fully supported by the Symmetrix software management suite, enabling storage administrators to simplify the provisioning of all of their storage tiers with advanced management tools including Dynamic Cache Partitioning, Virtual LUNs, Quality of Service Manager, and now Virtual Provisioning (see separate press release for details) to simplify overall management and application performance.

With new support for one terabyte SATA II disk drives on Symmetrix DMX-4 systems, EMC is further improving storage density while enhancing energy efficiency (see separate press release for details). The Symmetrix DMX-4, with support for flash drives, Fibre Channel disk drives and SATA disk drives, offers the broadest range of ‘in the box’ storage tiering options to enable the consolidation of all application tiers within a single system. By aligning data availability, service level requirements and software functionality with capacity and cost considerations through tiered storage, Symmetrix DMX-4 delivers the best performance, resiliency and energy efficiency available in the industry today.

“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.”

Availability

EMC plans to offer flash drives in 73 GB and 146 GB capacities for the Symmetrix DMX-4 platform beginning later in Q1 2008.
 

Handruin

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I haven't had one yet in our labs. I got the press release today in my in-box just like you saw the news press and didn't know about it until today. I guess they keep a tight lip on that stuff.

I was very happy to read the press release though, given how we discuss the SSD's here. I just hope that they really did some extended testing on the media to ensure no data loss, but I'm making a guess they likely RAID protect it like they do for everything else on their back end. I'll be curious to see if they did anything new with their caching compared to how it is now.

I'd love to have one of those in our labs also. The group I'm in is also a consumer of our own Symm product for production use (we also use clariion's and a celerra for other things). I manage several ESX farms right now, one with 5x Dell 2950's, 7x dell 6850's, and a new one we're building with 4x HP DL 380's. Each farm has vmotion with DRS enabled (for auto-migration based on performance loads) and they are all connected to the same Symmetrix (which I believe is a DMX - 2 half populated with 146GB drives) through multiple paths. It's fun stuff to play with.
 

LunarMist

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I don't see anything about the size of their SSDs. Are they much larger than 3.5" standard height drives?
 

Handruin

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I don't see anything about the size of their SSDs. Are they much larger than 3.5" standard height drives?

Physical size of a DMX is larger than a dishwasher and more like a refrigerator. The disk capacities were listed as either 73 or 146GB per drive inside.
 

Pradeep

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One would imagine they have it packaged in the same form factor as a SAS or FC drive. That way you could use existing drive enclosures, have the same hotswap incase of "drive" failure etc.
 

LunarMist

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All the EMC products I've ever seen have been about the size of a dishwasher, Lunar.

Yes, I have seen some too. ;) I meant to ask if each 146 GB drive is the standard size or is the capacity only achived by a large device that takes the space of several drives.
 

Handruin

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The way a symmetrix functions is unlike that of a huge JDOB cabinet. Each physical drive (be it SSD or spindle) are pooled in a way that you the consumer never sees. You basically need to have a "device" or LUN create to the size you want and RAID spec's that meet your needs and internally the symmetrix makes sure not to places the meta pieces all on the same physical disk and also ensures they are redundant (provided you selected a mirror). The end result is presented to your host as a single symmetrix device. You never get a 1 to 1 mapping with the internal physical drive.

I believe the answer to your question are that the SSD capacities that can be populated into the symm bays are either 73GB or 146. Those can then be turned into a drive size that you desire in relation to the information I included above.
 

Pradeep

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Sounds like NetApp with their "aggregates" aka bunch of spindles based on IO needs.
 
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