EMCEMC +1.22% Corp, which has dominated the corporate data storage systems business for more than three decades, faces pressure from a new generation of startups that want to capitalize on rising demand for the fast, but expensive, solid-state memory known as flash. The company acknowledges that flash is disrupting its markets, and has placed multiple bets on its future.

Flash is the storage media that is used in smartphones and many tablets. Unlike the traditional hard drive, it has no whirring parts, which allows it to boot up fast and retrieve information quickly. Over the years, it has moved from use primarily in mobile devices to many laptops. Increasingly, it is now moving into the corporate data center, where there is a need for faster storage systems to sift through unprecedented amounts of information. While racks, or arrays, of hard drives are still by far the dominant storage media in the data center, the use of flash is expected to grow.

“Flash is a big part of the evolution of storage,” David Goulden, CEO of the EMC Information Infrastructure business, told CIO Journal in an interview.

The market for all-flash arrays is expected to reach $1.6 billion in 2016, up from about $300 million last year, according to Natalya Yezhkova, research director of storage systems at IDC. That doesn’t include the market for hybrid arrays, which are part flash and part hard drive.

EMC was beat to market in the all-flash sector by startups such as Pure Storage Inc. But in the last few months, it has moved to catch up. Late last fall, it released its first all-storage array, called XtremIO. EMC also has bet heavily on hybrid arrays, which it says will be useful for many years.

The big question for flash, “is how you take cost out,” Mr. Goulden says. In many cases, he argues, it still makes sense to use flash sparingly, in a hybrid system. “We are going to have a concept of the hot edge and the cold core, with lots of flash close to the application and Big Data ‘lakes,’ so that that you can run analysis against huge data sets,” Mr. Goulden says.

He does acknowledge a demand for all-flash arrays, as well as hybrid arrays: “In the future, you will see us introduce multiple tiers of flash.”

A number of startups are taking a different and more radical approach in their effort to drive down the cost of flash. Pure Storage says that it has developed proprietary algorithms that compress data and reduce the need to duplicate information. “There is a sea-change coming to the storage market. Flash is so much more powerful than disc, in terms of  performance, energy conservation, space, reliability and simplicity,” Pure CEO Scott Dietzen says. “We shrink the amount of data we need to store, compared to the disc array, by about six-fold. That allows us to close the cost gap. You can argue that flash is four times as expensive, but with six times more capacity, we are actually cheaper.”

The company raised $150 million last August.

The rise of the all-flash array has hit some bumps, though. Shares of Violin Memory Inc.VMEM +3.98%, an all-flash pioneer, fell sharply following its IPO, leading to the ouster of CEO Don Basile in December. He was replaced in February by Kevin DeNuccio.

Despite the emergence of a new cutting edge, CIOs and other customers still express interest in hybrid approaches. As CIO Journal reported in May, Ethan Erchinger, who runs a four-person IT shop at Comcast Corp.’s Silicon Valley Innovation Center, is moving away from a single disc-based data store and installing hybrid flash storage near his server racks.

“We have seen an improvement in terms of operations. It is about four times faster,” he said. But Mr. Erchinger told CIO Journal that an approach based entirely on flash is too expensive, with a price tag of $6 or more per gigabyte. Disc drives can be purchased for much less –in the range of 50 cents to $1 for the same amount of capacity, while the price of a hybrid approach is “closer” to that of a disc, he said.

Regardless of what form it takes, flash is here to stay. Says Mr. Goulden: “A few years ago, most demand was for backup and support. That’s not gone away, but there also has been an extension into speed. Customers want lightning fast performance, measured in microseconds, not milliseconds. That is where flash comes into play.”

By: DocMemory
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