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EMC DMX-4 Systems  (Source: EMC)
EMC adds SSD compatibility to DMX-4 platform

Technology enthusiasts understand the benefits of using solid state drives (SSD) based on flash storage technology as compared to traditional hard drives. The SSD drives are much faster thanks to not needing to spin platters or move read or write heads to retrieve or write data to the drive.

EMC Corporation announced today that its latest enterprise class storage device, the Symmetrix DMX-4 system, is now compatible with SSD drives. EMC has SSD drives built to its specifications for use in the DMX-4 system. The DMX-4 system is compatible with Fibre Channel drives, SATA drives, and now SSD drives.

EMC says that to match the performance of its SSD equipped DMX-4 system would take thirty 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel drives. Another big benefit of using SSD drives inside the DMX-4 is power consumption. SSD drives require 38% less power according to EMC to store one terabyte of data when compared to traditional drives storing the same amount of data.

David Donatelli, President of EMC Storage Division says, “With this announcement [SSD storage system], 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 says its SSD drives for use in the DMX-4 will be available in both 73GB and 146GB capacities later in Q1 of 2008. EMC declined to comment on pricing at this time.

The storage capacities EMC is offering are not commonly seen capacities. Typical SSD drive capacities range from 32GB to 128GB. However, BiTMICRO announced earlier this month that it had a new SSD drive with a massive 832GB storage capacity.

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EMC Pioneer?
By Ammohunt on 1/14/2008 4:45:59 PM , Rating: 2
The didn't mention pricing becasue EMC does not have a price structure. It all depends on how much they can convince a company its worth.




RE: EMC Pioneer?
By schmattie on 1/14/2008 5:06:00 PM , Rating: 2
Or it could be the way a DMX is designed and the pricing structure would change depending on how many DA's,cache and FA ports etc, ect the DMX has...

DMX's have set prices.


RE: EMC Pioneer?
By Ammohunt on 1/15/2008 2:54:46 PM , Rating: 2
Haven't ever done business with EMC i see. At a company i worked for in the past EMC priced the identical Frames one to our group and one to another business unit. The two exact frames had a $1 Million dollar price difference when that was pointed out to EMC by one of our Engineers(since our group would be handling the hardware in both cases) they gave us a Clarion system to patch things up.


RE: EMC Pioneer?
By Cr0nJ0b on 1/14/2008 5:16:11 PM , Rating: 2
I'm not sure the price has been set just yet. They are early to market with this type of product, so I'm sure that there are still questions about capacity and packaging per unit.

The interesting thing here is the 30x IOPs per unit. In lots of cases you need to buy tons of extra, un-usable capacity to hit an IOP number. This would allow for a much smaller disk footprint to acheive the same performance level. It's cooler too and less moving parts is always a good thing.


RE: EMC Pioneer?
By gadgetsstink on 1/15/2008 12:04:15 AM , Rating: 2
Agreed, considering the product isn't officially on the market yet, I'm guessing "final" pricing isn't in the system. I'm sure I could get a quote, but the price may be subject to change.

While the number of random IOPs has increased, I doubt sequential I/O will see a drastic improvement. I see a great fit for these devices specifically for online redo logs, temp tablespaces, etc. I don't think I could justify throwing the entire contents of a 10 TB database on SSD, but certainly the smaller components would find a great home here.

I spent some time looking at a different form of SSD. TI produces Fibre Channel RAM servers which provide battery backed RAM over switched fabric. The performance would actually be much higher with this type of device over a flash based disk drive. There was two downsides. 1) I would need double the physical capacity so we could host based (software) mirror across separate hardware units for redundancy. 2) The cost is ridiculous...roughly $1000 per mirrored GB.

Putting these drives into a DMX-4 is a great next step. I'd just like them to take the next step and truly provide native virtualization in the array. Once they do, you can dedup, encrypt, compress, snap and provide "hot tiering so to speak" on block level data. They are getting close...maybe someday. I doubt they want to part with their hugely expensive software products though.


RE: EMC Pioneer?
By ToeCutter on 1/15/2008 1:40:11 PM , Rating: 2
Agreed.

Their "list" pricing is constant, but I've never seen anyone buy at list.

End user cost slides around between 50-70% of list. And it all depends on the sales rep, what kind on month/quarter he's having, inventory, who else you're looking at, etc.

Call EMC twice, and I promise you you'll get two different prices.

I once guzzled the EMC Kool-Aid. Then it went sour as they over-promised and under-delivered every single freaking time, leaving me and my employer holding the bag. EMC has turned off more people to their products than all the others combined. And, there's technology out there that blows the doors off EMC, with a lower price to boot.

Why anyone still shops them is a mystery to me...


Strange sizes
By yanman on 1/14/2008 7:38:47 PM , Rating: 2
I'd be very surprised if that 74/146 size quote is correct.

They can only use drives that are available on the market, they don't make their own. I wouldn't be surprised if they're looking at the BiTMICRO 832GB ones.




RE: Strange sizes
By gadgetsstink on 1/14/2008 11:45:36 PM , Rating: 2
I'm somewhat certain the 73 and 146 GB drives in the press release is correct. Most customers running with the next best thing (15K drives) usually fix their configuration around a specific hyper size. Certain hyper sizes fit really well into 73 and 146 GB drives minus overhead. If EMC wants to sell a drive which may run at several times the cost of a comparable 15K drive, customers will want to use the exact same hyper size as they did on their Fibre Channel drives.

Also, I'd venture to guess it's a little easier to produce flash drives at odd sizes considering there is no platter restriction.


RE: Strange sizes
By amanojaku on 1/15/2008 12:27:00 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
They can only use drives that are available on the market, they don't make their own.


Heh heh... EMC, my parent company, does NOT use off the shelf parts. I wanted to buy a low end EMC SAN without disks and learned that the disk arrays use custom drives. Even if the disks are designed as standard drives they are still altered so that only those drives work in EMC SANs. In other words don't expect to buy a diskless EMC SAN and install BiTMICRO, or anyone else's, drives.


RE: Strange sizes
By ToeCutter on 1/15/2008 1:33:23 PM , Rating: 2
Whatever. If you worked in the industry, you'd know first-hand that they ALL use the same drives. Seagate, Hitachi, whatever.

I have countless customers that have popped all kinds of different drives into Clariion, all you need is an empty drive sled.

EMC doesn't have a SKU for an empty SAN, which is why you couldn't buy it that way.

This is nothing more than a BS announcement from EMC. SSD won't be available from EMC for months. By then, everyone will be on the SSD bandwagon, but EMC can say "we were the first!".

Remember: EMC spends FAR more on marketing than they do R&D.


Revo-Evo?
By Inkjammer on 1/15/2008 1:14:03 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
"With this announcement [SSD storage system], EMC has again revolutionized the storage industry."
I like how they have "revolutionized" the storage industry by upgrading their current server NAS and backup solutions with a mere technology refresh. This is an evolution, not a revolution. I think they've been reading Apple press releases a lil' too much.

Granted, they are the first to utilize SSDs insuch a manner, so props to them on that.




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