Analysis

posted on 21 May 2008 22:11

The day after keynoting at his company's EMC World Las Vegas conference EMC chairman and CEO Joe Tucci presented to a JP Morgan Technology Conference in Boston, Mass. He said flash solid state drives (SSDs) are going to radically change the storage business.

Expanding on his EMC World keynote and suporting views expressed the day before by SanDisk CEO Eli Hariri, he said multi-level cell (MLC) flash will be much more affordable than the present single level cell (SLC) technology, and EMC will build storage arrays full of the stuff.

Compared to hard drives flash is phenomenally faster and more reliable. He said that it wouldn't just be used to provide fast storage in performance-centric arrays, currently built using Fibre Channel drives. EMC will build arrays using slower, high-capacity, serial ATA (SATA) drives with a large flash cache to speed up access to the array as a whole.

Over the mid to long-term other technologies might emerge to compete with flash but they will be solid state as well and not alter the trend for solid state storage to invade the hard drive storage space.

Tucci touched on other topics as well: the surging of unstructured data; the need for organising meta data; the opportunity for cloud computing services to store consumer and business data; and EMC's idea of expanding into offering cloud computing services with the current 600,000 Mozy online backup users as a start. EMC will bring Mozy to Europe and Asia. (He was referring here, it's thought, to EMC building data centers in Europe and Asia to support Mozy services in those continents.)

More here.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}