Analysis

posted on 20 May 2008 05:00

EMC believes flash solid state drives and SAS or Fibre Channel hard drives will be at the same price/GB level by the end of 2010.

Speaking at the Las Vegas EMC World event at the Mandalay Bay conference centre and casino, David Donatelli, president of EMC's storage division, put this message across. With the much faster response of flash SSDs to I/O requests and greater bandwidth than hard drives - he says 30 times more I/Os per second - this should prompt a mass switch-over to them from fast hard drives by storage array vendors and by customers.

It's not clear if he means multi-level cell (MLC) technology flash or the faster but more expensive single level cell (SLC) chips. MLC chips have two or three times the capacity of SLC chips but are slower. SLC chips would need to have greater than 50 percent price falls per year to reach HDD price parity by the end of 2010.

EMC is already shipping tier 0 flash SSD storage for its DMX-4 array to customers who are willing to pay the flash performance premium. HDS yesterday announced it will support flash SSDs in its USP-V and USP-VM storage arrays later this year, although it didn't name suppliers. It is clearly a believer in flash technology developments.

This indicates that IBM will add a flash SSD tier 0 capablity to its DS-8000 arrays. Also, HDS OEMs HP and Sun will inherit a flash SSD capability through HDS' adoption.

Further, all mainstream storage array vendors with Fibre Channel and/or SAS performance drives - meaning SAS 2 at 6Gbit/s in a year or so - will have their technology strategy people looking seriously at flash. That means 3PAR, Compellent, NetApp, and Pillar Data, also Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Fujitsu wth its Eternus arrays, plus the iSCSI SAN suppliers such as Dell/EqualLogic and Left Hand Networks, unified array suppliers like Reldata, fast NAS suppliers like Blu-Arc, and the scale-out storage people like Atrato, Exagrid, Isilon and Xiotech - everybody in fact.

The tehnology door is also open for new fast storage array vendors to emerge from the ranks of the flash chip and controller makers - think Intel, Samsung, STEC, etc.

Looking beyond 2011 and assuming no technology stopper gets in the way, such as write cycle limitations, then flash SSD price declines will continue and mid-range drives will be affected. Taken at face value the import of Donatelli's presentation is that enterprise SAS drive arrays are doomed. Flash will take over as it gradually trickles down the disk tiers in a drive array, heading towards the SATA capacity tier.

If Donatelli is right then we are looking at a wholesale flash SSD makeover for performance-centric drive arrays. The extreme case is one of drive arrays with just two tiers: a flash SSD performance tier and a SATA capacity tier.

In the high-end drive array casino the writing is on the wall.

The flash chips are down.

Make your bets please.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}