EMC Said to Eye SSDs for CLARiiON

Word on the street has it that EMC is getting ready to add a solid-state tier to its CLARiiON drive array, a move that would continue the company's recent deployment of flash technology across its product lines.

The likeliest candidate for an SSD would be the top-end CX3 array, with the provider most probably STEC. The two companies already are working together on a series of flash drives for the Symmetrix DMX-4 array.

An SSD in the CLARiiON array would give it a jolt in performance, although at a price that would certainly be much higher than the current Fibre Channel drives it now holds. Still, some of that cost can be recouped through lower operating expenses and higher overall network performance.

SSDs have been steadily making inroads in enterprise-class storage systems this year following years of research and development to improve their capabilities beyond the laptop and mobile devices level. Still, EMC and Hitachi Data Systems are the only top-tier vendors to have embraced SSDs. IBM and HP have yet to announce their intentions.