There was a time when Steve Wozniak’s storage startup Fusion-io was grabbing headlines for its unique approach to business-grade storage appliances – it relied on flash drives instead of spinning discs.
Back in 2008, that firm won press for bringing Apple’s co-founder on board as its chief science officer and winning Facebook as a client. Its technology using solid state discs provided better performance than the rest of the storage appliance market, still relying on spinning hard drives to put away large amounts of data.
But other firms are starting to catch up as SSDs become more popular and commonplace. Take EMC Corp., which is launching a new versions of its mid-range VNX storage appliances with SSDs and faster processors, as reported by IT World Canada’s own Howard Solomon.
With seven new models, mid-sized firms requiring not so much space, but more input and output bandwidth will be interested in the smaller footprint array, all-flash storage VNX-F. Prices start at $30,000 USD, and the model numbers include VNX5200, 5400, 5800, 7600, and 8000.
EMC is promising support for as many as 6,600 virtual machines and only five minutes of downtime per year, Solomon reports.
With even enterprise grade storage appliances switching to SSDs, you wonder how long it will be before spinning hard drives see their last rotation.