Welcome to the premiere Episode of Inside Flash. Inside Flash is your connection to flash technologies here at EMC.
EMC first introduced Flash technology with Symmetrix DMX-4 systems back in early 2008. That’s 4 years and two generations ago. The impact at the time was HUGE, and Industry Analysts were quoted as saying, “This could very well be one of those killer advantages that only appear every 10-15 years”. In reality, this created the first category of “Flash” in the enterprise, Flash in the array. Flash in the array set the stage for EMC FAST or Fully Automated Storage Tiering. This automated tiering process ensures application data is on the right tier of storage at the right time, at a sub LUN level. So if a single data set, or table, in your database is heavily accessed, it would be automatically moved to EFDs or flash (The Highest Performance tier). While the less used data would migrate to a lower performance storage tier (Maybe SATA). Customers all over have found that a little Flash would go a long way, reducing physical spindle requirements and increasing performance. The Hybrid Flash Array is born.
While there is tremendous advantage in the Hybrid array, tradition IO still needs to traverse a storage network. To further increase response time, EMC continued the trend of Flash innovation with the announcement of Project Lightning at EMC World 2011. Project Lightning, now EMC VFCache, is server-side PCIe based Flash that can be configured as a Cache, local storage or both. The hardware is the easy part; the most important piece is the software!!
VFCache software includes technology at the heart of EMCs data protection heritage. This secret sauce includes EMC technologies and patents based on decades of engineering. It is the best of the best of the best and nothing else. That software extends EMCs FAST to the server itself. Allowing IO to be measured in Microseconds (not milliseconds), VFCache represents what I see as the second of four categories of Flash in the enterprise.
Inside Flash is your connection to all things EMC and Flash. Check out the blog at insideflash.emc.com and be sure to follow me on Twitter @emcmsft and @insideflash Thanks for watching, and feel free to contact me via email Sam Marraccini, (sam.marraccini@emc.com)
