EMC executives believe that Fibre Channel storage could be a thing of the past in just a few years as enterprises increase adoption of flash memory for I/O-intensive applications, while storing less-frequently used data on inexpensive SATA drives.
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In 2008, storage vendors like EMC were saying that flash was about 20 times more expensive than Fibre Channel drives on a per-gigabyte basis, but worth the price for some applications because of superior data access speeds and lower power use.
But prices are dropping quickly as the storage industry places more research funding into building solid-state drives (SSD) capable of standing up to enterprise workloads. Last year the price of enterprise flash was about 10 times that of Fibre Channel drives, and now it’s getting down near the 7-times range and the gap is expected to continue to narrow, EMC storage executives said in an interview at the company’s Massachusetts headquarters.
Once flash achieves price parity “we think that’s the end of Fibre Channel drives because you’ll have price points that are very attractive” for flash and SATA, said Frank Hauck, an executive vice president who’s in charge of EMC’s storage division. “You won’t need a Fibre Channel drive.”
The storage industry is probably still two or three years away from that happening, EMC executives said. EMC is investing in several start-ups in the flash market to spur innovation — progress on a few fronts will be needed for flash to reach its potential in the enterprise, they said.
One goal is to improve management of consumer-grade, multi-level cell flash chips, which are less expensive than the single-cell chips used today for enterprise products. More advanced wear leveling and error correction can improve the viability of the less expensive consumer flash.
Another key goal is to further automate the movement of data between flash and less-expensive tiers of storage. Last year, EMC addressed criticism that its storage arrays force administrators to manually move data from tier to tier by introducing software called FAST, or Fully Automated Storage Tiering.