Over the summer, AdvizeX hosted a series of events highlighting EMC’s flash technology.
These events included: a Pirates game in Pittsburgh, a Clippers game in Columbus, and a golf event in Akron, Ohio at the Firestone Country Club. At all these events we reviewed the latest IT trends and platform evolution, while exploring flash technology and how it is transforming the way applications are deployed. Participants learned how flash is integrated across EMC’s full product line, from servers to hybrid storage arrays, to all-flash storage arrays.
For years traditional spinning drives have been depended upon to deliver performance and capacity to data centers. These drives are falling short with the sky-rocketing processing abilities and demands of today’s data center. Data storage requirements also continue to grow as Big Data and applications require more storage of historical data.
Flash technology has emerged as a powerful force in enterprise data centers. Flash storage, or solid-state storage, offers improved performance across the storage environment, more compact storage, and lower power consumption. High performance storage helps manage costs and deliver business value especially when applications drive high I/O (input/output) to handle frequent transactions.
EMC offers a portfolio of flash solutions to fit different enterprise needs and application demands. Below is a summary of some of the EMC flash technology highlighted at the AdvizeX events.
EMC Server Flash Solutions
When flash is deployed in the server, application speed accelerates and performance increases, maximizing application performance. XtremSF is a high-capacity PCIe flash card that is deployed in the server as a local storage device for application acceleration. When data is stored locally on the server, latency is reduced and throughput is accelerated, therefore, improving performance. XtremSF works well with workloads that are both highly transactional and high performance. XtremSW Cache adds intelligent server flash caching software to XtemSF. XtremSW Cache is ideal for mission critical workloads, for example, web applications, customer relationship management (CRM), and e-mail applications.
EMC All-Flash Array
XtremIO combines the power of flash and the capability of enterprise storage while delivering content–based data placement and always on deduplication. XtremIO is ideal for high performance workloads that require a lot of data translating and reporting. XtremIO works well with VDI (Virtual Desktop Interfaces) and virtual servers by managing your storage based on actual capacity, therefore, offering higher performance at a lower cost.
EMC Flash Hybrid Array
Flash Hybrid Arrays are the most economical way to leverage high performance flash technology. They offer the lowest storage cost per I/O and gigabyte. EMC’s VMAX, VNX, and ISILON move data across existing data tiers. They provide economical load balancing by combining low cost HDDs (hard disk drives) and high performance SSDs. These solutions use EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) software to move data intelligently and automatically to flash and other storage tiers based on user predefined policies. A hybrid array is ideal for predictable and persistent data and offers a balance of performance and price. ▪