EMC Storage Product Knowledge Sharing

EMC Brings Flash Drives in DMX-4 Frame

I have attended EMC Live classroom for new series of symmetrix DMX-4. I thought to share depth new architectural knowledge to you all.

EMC made a important announcement with respect to its 73 GB and 146 GB flash drives or solid state drives (SSD). Flash Drives and SSD represent a new solid-state storage tier, “tier 0”, for symmetrix DMX-4. In addition to that EMC will offer Virtual Provisioning for Symmetrix 3 and 4 as well 1 TB SATA II drives.

With this announcement EMC became first storage vendor to integrate Flash Technology into its enterprise-class arrays. There as excitement in industry who is looking for faster transaction and performance. Why this much excitement for new customer? I will be discussing some technical stuff in coming paragraph.

With flash drive technology in a Symmetrix DMX-4 storage system, a credit card provider could clear up to six transactions in the time it once took to process a single transaction. Overall, EMC’s efforts could significantly alter the dynamics of the flash SSD market, where standalone flash storage systems have been available only from smaller vendors.

EMC said that the new flash drives will cost about 30 times what an equivalent size high speed FC drive, and estimated that adding four drives would raise the cost of a Symmetrix disk storage system by about 10%. But in high-end business applications where every bit of IOPS performance counts, that premium becomes entirely acceptable. When an organization truly needs a major boost then flash drives are a very real and very reasonable solution.

Now, let’s talk about technical specification:

# DMX-4 can support upto 128 Flash drives in a frame

# Flash dives manufactured by STEC,Inc

# DMX-4 uses RAID 5(3+1) and (7+1) for flash drives

# Flash drives will operate on a 2GB/s FC loop

# Flash drives have in two size 73 GB and 146 GB 3।5” FC drive form factor at 2GB/s

# Flash drives support both format FBA and CKD emulation

# Limitation: - All the members must be Flash drives within same quadrant। (DA pair)

# Must have at least one flash drive as a Hot Spare।

# RAID 1 and RAID 6 are also in qualification

# Mixing Flash & Disk drives on the same loop is allowed

# PowerVault drives must be hard disk drives

# Maximum 32 flash drives per DA

# Cache Partiioning and QOS priority control highly recommended

# Flash Drives cab be protected with TimeFinder and SRDF

Most Suitable for Customer like:

# Algorithmic Trading

# Currency Exchange & Arbitrage
# Trade Optimization

# Real Time Data/Feed Processing

# Credit Card Fraud Detection

# Contextual Web Advertising

# Real Time Transaction Systems

# Data Modeling & Analysis

One Flash drive can deliver IOPS equivalent to 30 15K hard disk drives with approximately 1 ms application response time. This means Flash memory achieves unprecedented performance and the lowest latency ever available in an enterprise-class storage array.