Interviews

posted on 28 May 2008 11:20

An EMC spokesperson kindly replied to questions concerning the apparently differing views on solid state disk (SSD) and hard disk drive (HDD) pricing trends between EMC and Gartner. (See EMC Versus Gartner http://www.blocksandfiles.com/article/5292 )

B&F: Could EMC share its data on flash SSD price declines and Fibre Channel hard disk drive price declines to show when pricing parity would be reached please? Where does this EMC data come from?

EMC: EMC's data is based on our direct insights (as one of the world's largest consumers) into the storage and silicon supply chains.

B&F: Does EMC think that the Gartner data on desktop HDD and packaged flash SSD price erosion is wrong? Or that Gartner's packaged flash SSD pricing

EMC: Gartner's analysis is looking at flash drives as a commodity, and specifically, at flash deployed in the low-end of the market for laptops, etc. EMC's perspective is in the enterprise space - Gartner is
comparing flash SSD costs/GB to that of 500GB SATA drives.

Joe Tucci's and Dave Donatelli's comparisons were to the highest performing disk drives, which are 15K or perhaps 20K rpm and probably 146GB or smaller.  Customers must use large numbers of these drives to attain their required performance SLAs, and access density limits the real "usable" capacity of these drives to as low as 9-18GB.

B&F: Does EMC think that the Gartner data on desktop HDD and packaged flash SSD price erosion is wrong? Or that Gartner's packaged flash SSD pricing or HDD pricing individually are wrong?

EMC: We cannot comment directly on Gartner's estimates for Flash SSD or HDDs, except to say Gartner is comparing a different class of storage.

B&F: Does EMC think that Fibre Channel high-performance drives will have a price decline to below that of desktop drives?

EMC: Price declines of enterprise-class drives has historically been independent of price declines of desktop/laptop storage, due to the performance limitations (bigger drives aren't any faster, so the
capacity points of enterprise drives hasn't been growing as rapidly over the past 4-5 years - costs erode primarily due to larger capacity, unless you need performance).

B&F: Does EMC think that the packaged flash drives it is using in Symmetrix have a different price and price decline curve than the packaged flash drives that the Gartner analyst is referring to?

EMC: Yes, we know that the price erosion rates for the enterprise-class Flash SSDs we are using is independent from that of "PC-grade" flash drives.  They are very different drives built for very different use cases - given the wear-out aspect of NAND flash, a PC-Grade flash SSD isn't expected to handle heavy write workloads.  Over the life of the drive, it might never see more than 5% writes and 95% reads.  On the flip side, enterprise class drives must support much heavier transaction workloads, with as much as 40-50% write duty cycle.  It requires additional logic, wear leveling, cache buffers and other technologies to build a drive that can support the workloads typical of an enterprise-class application.

(See also Gartner on flash SSDs and HDD price trends.)

^{[Chris Mellor.]}