Solid state disks (SSD) will be the biggest change in the industry as long as the price continues to drop.
That's the opinion of Joe Tucci, chairman and chief executive of EMC, who gave the first key note speech at EMC World in Orlando, Florida today.
He said: "What's hot in storage right now? SSD. Flash will dominate for the foreseeable future and this will totally change the game in arrays. Obviously for this to work we need the prices to come down."
We all know this is what is holding back SSD but Tucci showed figures that make it look like the price really is improving.
He said: "When we first launched SSD in the first quarter of 2008 it was 30 times faster but 40 times more expensive. If you fast forward one year the prices have come down by 76 per cent. It will continue to drop and if you look at the inherent benefits... it is just going to change the landscape."
He added: "That is what's hot."
That's not the only thing Tucci thinks is "hot" in the world of storage at the moment. He made the claim that due to EMC's majority share 84 per cent in VMware, it has more than a 50 per cent share of the virtual market which is a "growing area of interest with growing need."
Also considered "hot" was cloud-based storage, customers moving from backing up on tape to disk, fibre channel over ethernet (FcoE), automated storage and thin provisioning.
To conclude his hot tips, he made a pledge about EMC's green agenda, saying: " Everything we do we approach with a green thumb, if you will, to make sure we give you the maximum efficiency in your corporations."
