EMC Corp. is stepping up its commitment to a technology once seen as a threat, including a novel box backed by one of Silicon Valley’s most celebrated hardware designers.
On Monday, the company—which has agreed to be purchased by Dell Inc.—is introducing a new data storage system that resulted from its 2014 purchase of DSSD Inc. The startup was bankrolled by Arista Networks Inc. Chairman Andy Bechtolsheim, the German-born engineer...
EMC Corp. is stepping up its commitment to a technology once seen as a threat, including a novel box backed by one of Silicon Valley’s most celebrated hardware designers.
On Monday, the company—which has agreed to be purchased by Dell Inc.—is introducing a new data storage system that resulted from its 2014 purchase of DSSD Inc. The startup was bankrolled by Arista Networks Inc. Chairman Andy Bechtolsheim, the German-born engineer who co-founded and developed computers for Sun Microsystems Inc. and supplied early funding for Google Inc.
DSSD, like some other storage-device companies, opted to store data on flash memory chips rather than spinning disks. But it packaged the chips and connected them in a different way, dispensing with the usual layers of software that Mr. Bechtolsheim said choked the flow of data in and out of a system.
EMC says the resulting product, dubbed the DSSD D5, can transfer up to 10 times more data per second than other boxes that store data on flash chips.
“Most improvements are sort of incremental,” said Mr. Bechtolsheim in an interview. “This is an order of magnitude.”
EMC’s purchase of DSSD is one of several ways the company is shifting away from the hard-disk technology that was once fundamental to its business. Disk drives, though inexpensive per byte of data stored, are prone to mechanical breakdowns. Flash-based systems retrieve data about 100 times faster, draw much less power and have no moving parts to wear out.
EMC said revenue for its high-end storage gear—which mainly uses disk drives—fell 11% in the nine months ended in September, the most recent period in which it broke out the data.
The company moved to enter the flash storage market in 2012 when it bought XtremeIO, an Israeli startup that later completed development of flash-based hardware that has proven very popular. EMC reported more than a $1 billion in revenue for flash systems in 2015, and is ranked by International Data Corp. as No. 1 in that market by a wide margin.
EMC, besides debuting the DSSD boxes, is using an event in London to unveil a new flash-based member of its flagship VMAX line. It also expects to switch to flash-based systems for customers’ mainstream business applications—relegating disk systems to archives of older data and backup copies as a precaution in the event of outages.
The new DSSD boxes, starting at a list price of $1 million, aren't for everyone. Customers who want to wring maximum speed out of the systems will need to modify their software, Mr. Bechtolsheim said.
But EMC expects the investment—in time and money—to pay off for companies working on chores like genetic sequencing, detecting patterns of financial fraud, authorizing credit card transactions and advanced approaches to Wall Street trading.
“They really want it and they will pay for it,” said Jeremy Burton, EMC’s president of products and marketing.
The DSSD technology has been used by researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, which said it helped a supercomputer called Wrangler significantly speed up data-heavy scientific jobs. Dan Stanzione, the center’s director, cited a project that involved analyzing a huge database of proteins.
“It’s a problem we just could not finish,” he said. “It would run for a couple of days and just sort of die.”
With DSSD, researchers began getting results in a matter of hours, Mr. Stanzione said.
Scott Dietzen, chief executive of rival Pure Storage Inc., questioned how many users will need the DSSD device’s specialized features. “It feels very far from a mainstream product to us,” he said.
Mr. Burton said one person intrigued by the possibilities is Michael Dell, whose company stands to inherit DSSD on completion of its $67 billion deal for EMC. He said Mr. Dell received a lengthy briefing at DSSD’s Silicon Valley offices.
“He is pretty fired up about this,” Mr. Burton said.
Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com