EMC Buys Flash Storage Startup DSSD

At EMC World Monday in Las Vegas EMC went all in on rack-scale flash storage by announcing acquisition of stealth startup DSSD, which provides flash storage for I/O-intensive in-memory databases and big data workloads.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based DSSD was founded by ZFS-creators Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, as well as Andy Bechtolsheim, who is also chairman and chief development officer at Arista Networks.

The startup will operate as a standalone unit within EMC's Emerging Technology Products division, with Bechtolsheim serving as its strategic advisor.

“The prospects of what EMC and DSSD can achieve together are truly remarkable," he said. "We ventured out to create a new storage tier for transactional and big data applications that have the highest performance I/O requirements.

David Goulden, CEO of EMC Information Infrastructure, said the IT giant had established a relationship with DSSD more than one year ago when it led the Series A investment in the startup. "We're now thrilled to be joining forces with Andy, Bill and the entire DSSD team," he said.

"Complementary to our market-leading all-flash and hybrid storage portfolio, DSSD will unlock an abundance of new possibilities for customers as they build out their infrastructures to support the emerging tier of next-generation in-memory and big data workloads. ”

First DSSD products are expected in 2015. They will be optimized for in-memory databases such as SAP HANA and GemFire, real-time analytics, and high-performance applications used by research and government agencies.

DSSD has been granted patents for a "storage system with incremental multi-dimensional RAID" and patent a "storage system with guaranteed read latency."

EMC said it had sold more than 17 petabytes of flash capacity in the first quarter of 2014 alone, which was more than 70 percent more than it had sold in the first quarter of last year.