EMC's Flash strategy

Flash storage, past and present

Published January 2014

Solid-state storage has been around in some form or another for over three decades, but only in the last few years has it become widely adopted.

This change has been principally based on three things: the need for higher performance, the improvement of solid-state media itself, and the fact that the storage industry has developed tools that can leverage small amounts of a still relatively expensive resource to deliver great impact.

EMC kick-started the “new era” of flash when it introduced Enterprise Flash Drives (EFD) on its Symmetrix array in early 2008. Now every storage vendor offers flash in some manner.

This report first takes a quick look at the world of flash, before evaluating the applicability and logic of the EMC line-up.