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Setting Your Sights on SSDs: Page 2 of 5

I learned that large server and storage providers are still trying to wrap their arms around flash drives and solid state disk -- seems they may be harkening back to yesteryear when SSD was big and bulky and so overly priced that the ROI had to be enormous in order to even consider a 15-minute sales pitch. These vendors may be caught short as flash drive technology quickly evolves around them -- and what may now be innovative subsystem solutions become outmoded by drastic drive wattage reductions and phenomenal application response times.

I learned that my skepticism of EMC putting flash drives in the Symmetrix platform was healthy because it pushed me to learn more about EMC, and how they implement the technology to meet enterprise-class requirements.

Typical for EMC, they were working quietly with STEC (a quality flash drive provider) for some time, to prepare a STEC flash drive that meets the requirements of enterprise class utilization.

The question EMC and STEC faced: How do we increase the typical tens of thousands of write operations average? In addition, how do we increase the resilience of flash drive configurations so that they meet, or exceed, subsystem warranty periods?

Next Page: More thoughts on Flash