EMC may have broadened its corporate agenda to encompass security, enterprise content management, virtualisation software and infrastructure management over the past five years, but the heart of the company still beats faster when it is talking about information storage.

The 9,300 users and partners at the recent EMC World conference in Las Vegas were party to literally hundreds of announcements right across the EMC portfolio, but two themes stood out as representing a sea change in the way enterprise storage will be implemented and managed in the future.

The first is the flash revolution. While only a couple of years ago the company was making tentative noises about how solid state storage would gradually appear as a component alongside disk arrays, it now heralds an accelerated switchover to flash drives within high-end storage.

“By 2010, flash will have reached [price] parity with high-speed fibre channel disk. The enterprise flash drive will significantly change the way storage products are designed,” says Dave Donatelli, president of the company’s storage division.

Since introducing solid state drives in its Symmetrix range in the first quarter of 2008, EMC has seen highly positive performance characteristics for the drives. “The benefits are tremendous…the performance unbelievable,” says Donatelli.

To highlight these, it draws on the two standard measurements for disk drive performance: IOPS (input/output operations per second) and response time. When flash takes the place of EMC’s fastest disk drive, IOPS are 30 times faster, says Donatelli. The response time on a top-of-the-range disk drive is six milliseconds, with that number rising as the drive fills up; with flash, the response time is one millisecond or better, no matter how full the drive gets, he says.

At the same time, without moving parts, flash is not just more robust, it uses much less power – as much as 38% less, estimates Donatelli.

The anticipated shift to flash will be a watershed for EMC and the rest of the storage industry. While the company designs its current disk systems, it does not build flash drives. Its engineers have worked on a top secret flash development for the past two years, redesigning its systems to accommodate the drives and maximise their reliability, as well as guiding changes in the designs of flash manufacturers.

EMC has chosen flash components based on the SLC (single layer cell) design, because, it argues, these are more robust than the alternative multi-layer cell (MLC) products.

EMC says it will progressively combine flash with existing disk drive technologies. “We are by no means saying that spinning disks are dead – we see mixed environments. The disk drive will be around for a long time, particularly [low-cost] ATA drives,” says Donatelli.

Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC, echoes Donatelli’s words: “One of the things that will change the industry more than anything else over the next few years is flash.”

Flash will initially be deployed for more critical applications, says Tucci. But he adds, “Flash technology is coming down in price much faster than expected. And you can’t believe the difference this technology is going to make. A higher and higher percentage of your system will contain flash.

“It certainly has the capability to be the dominant force in the very high end [of storage].”

But flash is not the only fundamental change under way in enterprise storage. Data de-duplication technology has the potential to penetrate into almost every area where data is handled. The aim is to identify when multiple copies of the same piece of data exists and to ensure that only a single instance is stored, with pointers to that master copy. It is “one of the hottest topics in the marketplace, because there is so much [data] redundancy,” says Donatelli.

The biggest driver for this is the exponential growth of information.

“The amount of digital information being created and replicated each year is rising at a compound annual growth rate of 60%,” says Donatelli. “Most people managing it don’t get 60% more budget, more power, more floor-space.”

He talks of companies achieving a 90% reduction in the amount of data they have to back up as a result of applying de-duplication technology. And by copying less data, a proportionately lower amount of energy is used.

EMC entered the de-duplication market 18 months ago through the $165 million acquisition of back-up specialist Avamar, whose technology focuses on server side de-duplication – “before the data gets into a disk library,” says Tucci.

Although it offers a de-duplication appliance, EMC is also adding Avamar software to its arrays, virtual tape and other contact points with raw data.“De-dupe is going to exist in every part of your business,” says Tucci, “in many forms. It is very important in bringing down the data storage costs.”

Further reading

VMware CEO Greene ousted EMC tightens grip over virtualisation hot shot by replacing founder with company man

EMC buys a presence in European consulting

The next $1bn step in EMC’s ‘work in progress’ From high-end arrays to universal information infrastructure: re-inventing EMC Find more stories in the Storage Briefing Room