DSSD D5 – EMC’s quantum leap in flash storage with the rack-scale all-flash appliance

In their ‘Quantum Leap’ announcements, alongwith VMAX All-Flash storage EMC announced DSSD D5 flash appliance on Monday (29-Feb). And it is really a big leap in flash storage as they produce un-matching performance and capacity in small footprint. D5 is a ‘rack-scale’ flash appliance for today’s today’s and next-gen workloads, e.g; applications built on Hadoop.

10 Million IOPS and 100 Micro Seconds latency are real big numbers. Let’s dig in more to other highlights from D5 here in this post.

Hardware : DSSD D5 have a 5U module which with 2 redundant controllers and 36 drive slots. It can support a maximum of 144 TB of raw capacity (with 4TB flash modules). The system offers 100 TB of usable flash capacity in 5U. The system now supports 2TB/4TB (dual-ported, hot-swappable) flash modules and more in near-future.

NVMe : It’s ‘NVMe show’ with D5 as it helps the servers to have end-to-end PCIe NVMe access to the Flash modules. It is the key for providing shared flash storage via PCIe, by the NVMeF (NVMe over Fabric) in use in D5. The system supports 96 ports (48 ports per IO module) for host connectivity. i.e, 48 hosts (PCIe3 x4 lane availability) can be directly attached with redundant connectivity. As it is end-to-end NVMe enabled, there is no overhead of protocol translation.

DSSD D5 will act as a direct attached shared flash storage for varying workloads. It’s simply direct attached Flash with enterprise availability and features. NVMe  While supporting today’s database/data warehouse workloads it supports next-gen workloads including applications based on Hadoop also.

Availability : DSSD D5 is now available for order.

Additional reference : DSSD D5 data sheet,  EMC Press release