Flash could doom Fibre Channel, says EMC

The use of Fibre Channel-based hard disks could well be a thing of the past in just a few years, according to Frank Hauck, an executive vice president in charge of EMC's storage division.

Of course, this will only happen when the cost of enterprise flash drives achieves price parity with Fibre Channel drives. But if you would consider that flash drives were 20 times more expensive than Fibre Channel drives in 2008, but just 10 times the cost in 2009, it is clear that the gap is eroding quickly to the point where flash drives will become the obvious choice. In fact, the price difference is now down to just seven times the cost and is expected to narrow further.

Already, EMC says that many of its mid-tier customers are purchasing storage arrays with flash drives, with typical deployment containing 80 percent HDD and 20 percent SSD. For now, a key goal of EMC is to fully automate the movement of data between the HDD and SSD tiers via the use of more advanced software.

For more on this story:
- check out the article at Network World 

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