EMC First to Enter Enterprise Flash Drives With STEC

Flash drives were already offered as an option to replace magnetic hard disk drives for notebooks, for example by Dell with Samsung’s units. But nobody thought that they could replace or even complement enterprise drives so rapidly. With the recent announcements from EMC and STEC, this time has come.

EMC will offer the possibility to have three tiers on its Symmetrix DMX-4 enterprise storage array: very fast (but expansive) 76GB or 146GB flash disks, enterprise HDDs (15,000rpm), and low-cost, slower but high-capacity SATA drives.

Of course, HDDs will continue to co-exist with flash that cannot compete in term of capacity and price per gigabyte, but you can expect now that flash disks will progressively enter into disk arrays and replace hard disk drives as the price of flash chips is going down faster than HDDs. For a main reason:  with all their mechanical parts, magnetic disk drives cannot compete with flash for speed, especially for access time with HDDs limited to 7 to 10 milliseconds when flash are more in the hundreds microseconds. The rotation speed of Winchesters, the key for the transfer rate of data, culminated at 15,000 rpm since many years and even increasing this speed will not be a big factor to enhance the flow of data.

A number of big users of mainframes are ready to pay a premium to get a faster way to access to their data for online transactions and  they will jump on flash memories, even if EMC said that the price for these new flash disks will add around 10% to the Symmetrix.

There are two kinds of flash memories: SLC (Single-Layer Cell) and MLC (Multi-Layer Cell). EMC choses faster and more robust SLCs but they are more expansive than MLCs that you will  find more and more into consumer products (MP3 players, USB keys, etc).

The choice of STEC by EMC is not surprising. There are only three companies in the world able to design FC controllers for flash disks: BiTMICRO Networks (4Gb FC up to 16TB), Texas Memory with its RAMSan-500, a 4U rack containing one to two terabytes of flash memory with a 4Gb FC host controller with an incredible speed (and price), and finally STEC. None of these firms are manufacturing flash chips (STEC uses Samsung’s chips) but controllers only that manage them, as hard disk drives are also managed by controllers containing ASICs, processor and RAM.

Who is STEC?

Born in 1990 as Simple Technology and based in Santa Ana, CA, it enters in flash controllers following the acquisition of Cirrus Logic (then named Lexar) in 1994 and then SiliconTech in 1998. After an IPO in 2000, the company changed its name to SimpleTech one year later. Others acquisitions: SSD company Memtech in 2005 and Gnutek in 2006. Last year, Simpletech became STEC and sold its external disk drive business to start-up Fabrik.
One of the pioneer in flash disk controllers with BitMICRO, M-Systems (acquired by SanDisk), SST and Targa Systems Division, STEC has designed flash disks with different interfaces (IDE, SCSI and then SATA, SAS and FC).
For its last financial quarter ending in December, STEC expects revenues between $48 million and $51 million, to be compared to $44.7 million in 3Q07 and $43.7 million in 2Q07. The firm is currently opening a brand new manufacturing plant in Malaysia.

The reaction of EMC competitors

It’s clear that adding flash disks into an enterprise disk array has too many advantages to be ignored by the competition. The new devices can be considered as tier 1 followed by FC units being tier 2 and SATA HDDs as tier 3, for a faster access time and for applications like online transaction. You can also expect better transfer rate, reliability and less power consumption. We are now waiting for the reaction of HP, HDS, IBM, NetApp and others. They will have to follow, the only question being when and with which flash subcontractor.

Another company will not appreciate the new choice of EMC: Seagate Technology, its larger hard disk drive supplier. Seagate already entered in flash technology for notebooks with hybrid disks containing simultaneously an HDD and a flash buffer, but these products seem to have difficulties to succeed. But this time, it’s a drive offered by its best customer with flash memory only…
It’s not the end of the HDD industry but flash has already eliminated the smallest form factor HDDs, is entering into portable PCs, and now into enterprise arrays. Today, HDD has just one big argument: its price per gigabyte for a minimum capacity, around 20GB today, but more and more tomorrow.

Nevertheless, you will have to wait a decade to see a 1TB flash drive at the price of a 1TB  magnetic disk unit, currently at less than $300, not far from what costs a flash unit with 16GB only. You can remark that EMC,  STEC or any flash manufacturer is always reluctant to give you the exact price of their high-capacity units.

Comeback

To conclude, it’s funny to observe that EMC is coming back into solid-state drives. It was founded by Richard Egan and Roger Marino in Newton, MA in August 1979. Egan, a former Intel general manager, was attracted by the opportunity to sell add-on memory to the rapidly growing minicomputer marketplace. EMC’s first product was a 64 KB solid-state memory board. Its last one a 73/146GB solid-state disk.

Remember also  that the company killed IBM mainframe disk arrays in the old days with the arrival of its firsts Symmetrix, not only because they were using smaller and cheaper 5.25-inch form factor but also a big solid-state cache for excellent performances. One storage veteran told us that, at this time EMC was not selling mainly disks, but cache. All the successful days of EMC hardware was based on one word: SSD.

For its CLARiiON line, it’s different as it doesn’t use more RAM than the competition, but this product was originally designed by Data General (acquired in  1999), not EMC.