EMC announced today a couple of new twists on the flash/SSD storage end of the product spectrum. Specifically,
- They now support all flash/no-disk storage systems. Apparently they have been getting requests to eliminate disk storage altogether. Probably government IT but maybe some high-end enterprise customers with low-power, high performance requirements.
- They are going to roll out enterprise MLC flash. It’s unclear when it will be released but it’s coming soon, different price curve, different longevity (maybe), but brings down the cost of flash by ~2X.
- EMC is going to start selling server side Flash. Using storage FAST like caching algorithms to knit the storage to the server side Flash. Unclear what server Flash they will be using but it sounds a lot like a Fusion-IO type of product. How well the server cache and the storage cache talks is another matter. Chuck Hollis said EMC decided to redraw the boundary between storage and server and now there is a dotted line that spans the SAN/NAS boundary and carves out a piece of the server which is sort of on server caching.
Interesting to say the least. How well it’s tied to the rest of the FAST suite is critical. What happens when one or the other loses power, as Flash is non-volatile no data would be lost but the currency of the data for shared storage may be another question. Also having multiple servers in the environment may require cache coherence across the servers and storage participating in this data network!?
Some teaser announcements from Joe’s keynote:
- VPLEX asynchronous, active active supporting two datacenter access to the same data over 1700Km away Pittsburgh to Dallas.
- New Isilon record scalability and capacity the NL appliance. Can now support a 15PB file system, with trillions of files in it. One gene sequencer says a typical assay generates 500M objects/files…
- Embracing Hadoop open source products so that EMC will support Hadoop distro in an appliance or software only solution
Pat G also showed EMC Greenplum appliance searching a 8B row database to find out how many products have been shipped to a specific zip code…
