Enterprise Flash Drives (EFD) on EMC Symmetrix V-Max Systems

EMC has been a pioneer it its Flash Drive (EFD) Technology. With the V-Max Systems EMC has taken another leap in the Flash Drive technology to support larger and denser drives. Typically with EMC Symmetrix V-Max systems you will see support for 73GB, 146GB, 200GB and 400GB EFD’s.

The following are some of the characteristics and benefits of using Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD) with EMC Symmetrix V-Max Systems.

1. 30X IOPS compared to traditional disk drives
2. 98% less power consumption per I/O compared to traditional disk drives
3. 60% lighter in weight than traditional disk drives
4. 4GB interface available with Flash Drives
5. No spindles, no mechanical failures
6. Used for very high I/O, throughput and data hungry applications like Stock & Currency Trading, Algorithmic Trading, Data modeling, Real Time data needs, etc
7. No special software required to manage the EFD technology on EMC’s
8. Same looks feels of external casing of the EFD like the Traditional drives, fits in the same enclosure as a standard fiber channel drives
9. Drives are seen by the storage and host as traditional fiber channel drives (73GB, 146GB, 200GB, 400GB)
10. The above drives are also supported on the DMX-4 Series of machines
11. Flash Drives are classified as Tier 0 in the customer’s ILM tiering
12. Mirroring, Raid 5, Raid 6 is supported on Enterprise Flash Drives now, all members of the Raid group have to be on Enterprise Flash Drives
13. Flash drives support MetaLUN technology and all the member volumes of a metalun have to be on flash drives for it to work
14. Flash drives cannot be configured as Vault devices in V-Max or prior DMX series machines
15. A hot spare of a flash drive have to be configured as another flash drive.
16. Also the Symmetrix File Systems (SFS Volumes) cannot reside on Flash Drives
17. EMC certified erasure services are not supported on Flash Drives. The Flash drives have to be scrubbed through EMC based appliances services.  

A nice blog post by  Mark Peters at ESG about the SSD Technology