EMC Offers Bigger Enterprise Flash Drives

HOPKINTON, Mass. -- EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced the availability of new, larger-capacity, second-generation Enterprise Flash drives for its market-leading EMC(R) Symmetrix(R) DMX-4 storage systems. In 2008, EMC pioneered the use of this technology in enterprise storage arrays and saw increasing demand as customers worldwide realized significant performance improvements and cost savings using this innovative technology that uses flash memory to store and retrieve data.

The new 200GB (gigabyte) and 400GB Enterprise Flash drives have completed EMC's rigorous testing and qualification processes and are available immediately on Symmetrix DMX-4 storage systems for applications requiring consistent, ultra-fast performance, maximum utilization and the highest levels of reliability. EMC is the only vendor that offers Enterprise Flash drives across its portfolio of storage systems. It is the only vendor that has interlocked storage array cache functionality with Enterprise Flash drive wear-leveling algorithms to enable more efficient and cost-effective use of flash drive capacities and to optimize performance. The new larger capacity drives will also be available on EMC CLARiiON(R) midrange storage systems and EMC Celerra(R) unified storage systems later in 2009.

Milan, Italy-based SIA-SSB, a European leader in information and communication technology, providing services and solutions in the areas of credit and debit card processing, payment systems, capital markets, and network services for connectivity and messaging, has deployed Enterprise Flash drives on its EMC Symmetrix storage system to help it meet strict service levels and increasing workloads for payment processing.

"SIA-SSB processes 6.4 billion transactions annually related to credit cards, collections and payments," said Fabio Grignani, Chief Information Officer and Deputy General Manager at SIA-SSB. "We meet extremely demanding levels of service for our customers throughout Europe and are constantly trying to improve the efficiency of our systems and processes in order to be more competitive. Flash drive technology, as part of an overall EMC Payments Solution, was able to help improve application performance from 6,000 to 16,000 I/Os per second and reduce average response times by more than 60 percent, while monthly batch processing times improved significantly from 22 to 17 hours."

EMC Corp.