EMC has upped its Symmetrix DMX-4, Clariion and Celerra enterprise flash solid state drive capacities to 200GB and 400GB from the current 73GB maximum capacity.

The higher capacity STEC SSDs are available for Symmetrix now and Clarion and Celerra later this year. When the Celerra upgrade was announced in late February, the coming arrival of 400GB flash drives was indicated by Brad Bunce, EMC's IP storage product marketing director.

If we take a quick look at the capacity increase trend of such flash drives, then 2010 should see 1TB SSDs becoming available and their price might signal that the Fibre Channel disk drive's days are numbered.

We could view a comment from EMC's Barbara Robidoux, VP for storage marketing, as indicating this: "Customers are focused on being more efficient with their IT environments. The scalable performance, utilization and energy efficiency of enterprise flash technology combined with high-capacity, low-power SATA disk drives has provided them with a great one-two combination, helping them improve performance and save money."

That's the potential array future; a one-two combo of speedy SSD plus cheap bulk storage SATA drives. ®

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