EMC With STEC for Enterprise Flash Drives

Here are the press releases of EMC and then STEC.

EMC Corporation 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.

“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.”

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

EMC
Corporation

STEC, Inc. announced that EMC Corporation has selected
STEC’s Zeus-IOPS line of solid state drives (SSDs) for deployment in
its Symmetrix DMX-4 high-end networked storage systems. STEC’s
technology gives EMC a significant advantage in system-level
performance and further validates the surge in SSD adoption, marking an
important milestone in the evolution of enterprise storage.

"We believe that flash-based solid state storage is a game changing
technology and that STEC is at the forefront of the SSD market," said
Brian Gallagher, senior vice president and general manager, EMC Storage
Division. "Over the past year, EMC and STEC have collaborated to ensure
that the Zeus-IOPS Fibre Channel drive meets the stringent quality,
availability and reliability requirements of the enterprise storage
market. The resulting integration of enterprise-class SSDs with the
full breadth of Symmetrix DMX-4 features, capabilities and traditional
disk drives will provide our customers with unprecedented levels of
performance and energy efficiency for their most demanding
applications."

"This is strong validation of our leadership position in providing
SSDs to the Enterprise storage market, and we are delighted to partner
with EMC in delivering the highest performance enterprise storage
solutions," said Manouch Moshayedi, chief executive officer at STEC.
"We feel that this important collaborative effort represents true
innovation and market leadership by both companies. As a result of our
collective efforts, Zeus SSDs will provide EMC with unprecedented
levels of system-level performance. This union signifies the first
adoption of our Zeus-IOPS SSDs in the enterprise storage and enterprise
computing markets."

For more than a decade, EMC Symmetrix systems have continuously held
the market leadership position for high end storage. The Symmetrix
DMX-4 is the premier platform for the first ever enterprise-class
deployments of solid state storage and is the result of more than a
year of comprehensive testing and qualification. EMC’s strong position
as the industry leader in terms of performance and reliability is
reinforced in its ability to integrate SSD into its existing systems
and introduce this highest tier of storage to customers with the most
demanding performance requirements.

Zeus-IOPS SSDs, in the same form factor as industry standard 3.5"
hard disk drives, provide significant performance improvements, power
savings and improved total cost of ownership. In terms of performance,
while hard drive access times are measured in milliseconds, access
times for Zeus-IOPS SSDs are measured in microseconds, enabling
significant improvement in data input/output and latency.

The Zeus-IOPS is the fastest SSD available, based on all critical
facets of sustained sequential throughput and, most importantly,
sustained read and write input/output per second ("IOPS"). Given the
transaction-intensive nature of high-end enterprise storage systems,
the Zeus-IOPS drives are optimized to deliver the highest levels of
transactional performance.

Product specifications:

- Up to 52,000 Sustained Random Read IOPS
- Up to 17,000 Sustained Random Write IOPS
- Up to 250MB/sec sustained, sequential reads; 200MB/sec sustained, sequential writes
- Interfaces: Fibre Channel, SAS and 3Gb SATA
- Form Factor: 3.5-inch standard HDD dimensions
- Weight of less than 0.4 kg
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STEC, Inc.

EMC With STEC for Enterprise Flash Drives

The two press releases

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