EMC Unveils DSSD D5 is Quantum Leap in Flash Storage

EMC Corporation has announced EMC® DSSD™ D5™, a quantum leap in flash storage. Available in March, DSSD D5is the first of a new category of flash storage– Rack-Scale Flash.

DSSD D5 is a completely new architecture designed for the most data-intensive applications, both traditional and next-generation, which require extreme levels of performance and the lowest possible latency.

DSSD D5 reaches new performance heights, with real-world results that speed applications such as genetic sequencing calculations, fraud detection, credit card authorization, and advanced analytics by as much as 10X.

Enterprises at the cutting edge demand high-performance infrastructure to leverage data growth, data velocity and variety for business and customer needs.

These organizations require shared enterprise-ready flash storage with the highest levels of performance, throughput and almost nonexistent latency.

Latency that in the past was attained through direct-attached PCIe flash cards with major drawbacks in price, scale, expandability, serviceability, availability, and share ability – with every PCIe card an individually managed and non-redundant island of storage.

DSSD D5 delivers ultra-dense, high-performance, highly available and very low latency shared flash storage for up to 48 clients.

D5 is connected to each node through PCIe Gen3 and leverages NVMe technology, which delivers the performance of PCI-attached flash.

At the same time, D5 is a standalone appliance that is disaggregated from compute, delivering the benefits of shared storage.

The result is next-generation performance with latency as low as 100 microseconds, throughput as high as 100 GB/s, and IOPS of up to 10 million.

As a Rack-Scale Flash system, DSSD D5 addresses a different set of use cases than other all-flash storage arrays that are designed to accelerate traditional enterprise workloads.

The ultra-high performance D5 was developed from the ground up and packaged with multiple industry-first hardware and software innovations that set it apart from any other storage offering available on the market.

DSSD D5 moves beyond storage into the realm of enabling next-generation applications that require extreme performance and scalability.

According to CJ Desai, president Emerging Technologies Division, EMC Corporation, “EMC acquired DSSD in 2014 because we recognized its game-changing innovation. Today, we’re bringing a hardened, tested product to market, changing the face of flash as we know it and rounding out EMC’s already-robust flash portfolio. DSSD is a blazing fast, high-performing platform. Customers are in for magnitude improvement in what’s now possible for demanding applications in this new era of Rack-Scale Flash.”

Designed to meet the demands of the high-performance, data-intensive workloads of today, D5 also delivers a crucial link to emerging next-generation applications that are processing extremely large, fast-growing working sets with 100 percent hot and active data.

Proven Use Cases
EMC offers DSSD D5 to benefit diverse industries currently limited by traditional architectures that were not designed for the extreme performance needs of their business critical applications.

These include applications built on top of Hadoop, high performance databases and data warehouses as well as custom applications used for complex, real-time data processing and real-time analytics and insight.

DSSD D5 accelerates current databases and data warehouse solutions, such as Oracle, through an innovative low-latency data path to deliver 4X the speed for high-performance Oracle clusters in 1/25ththe footprint of competing products.

With DSSD D5, customers can consolidate multiple applications onto a single storage platform, and simplify data warehouses by eliminating multiple copies of data, complex indexing, intricate partitioning, and the need for materialized views. 

For Hadoop workloads, DSSD D5 significantly accelerates operational analytics compared to traditional DAS infrastructure.

Also, customers can independently scale compute and storage, capturing maximum return from their flash investment by writing only one copy of data on flash, irrespective of replication factor set in HDFS.

Availability
EMC DSSD D5 is generally available in March 2016.

Also speaking, a partner of EMC, Bob Olwig, VP of Business Strategy & Marketing, World Wide Technology, Inc., "WWT has been an early DSSD partner and tested and validated the D5, and we've demonstrated the performance and TCO benefits of rack-scale flash to our joint customers. 

Increasingly, customers are looking to WWT for innovations that solve challenging business problems, particularly in the areas of Big Data and high performance enterprise analytics. DSSD's D5 storage product is screaming fast and we see immediate benefits the D5 can bring to IT environments within our Financial Services, Technology/Telco and Federal verticals.”