Huawei Symantec releases all-flash storage array

Huawei Symantec has developed an all-flash storage array to serve applications that are subject to large amounts of read-intensive traffic.

The Dorado 2100 was announced on Monday at Huawei Symantec's North American Partner Summit in Santa Clara, California.

"Most virtualised datacentres today face a constant barrage of inbound requests, all asking the same questions," Jane Li, the general manager of North America for Huawei-Symantec, said in a statement. "[This] takes a heavy toll on datacentre managers and drives up operating expenses."

The appliance is designed to scale up and down, so it can be targeted at small businesses as well as enterprises, the company said in a statement.

The company described the Dorado 2100 as "small in size" and said that it will have two storage controllers, adding redundancy to the hardware in case a controller fails, but there are few further details available.

"I think all-flash arrays are going to be a niche market for high-performance computing [applications]," Gene Ruth, a research director for storage for Gartner, told ZDNet UK on Tuesday.

"Because of the price pressures, SSDs are never going to be competitive on a capacity basis with HDDs, but there are plenty of high-performance computing applications out there — like for financial industries and databases — where SSDs can be competitive for delivering the kind of performance the customers need," he said.

Because of the price pressures, SSDs are never going to be competitive on a capacity basis with HDDs.

– Gene Ruth, Gartner

A few companies make all-flash arrays, such as Violin Memory, Texas Memory Systems and Oracle with hardware acquired from Sun in 2010.

Nonetheless, Ruth expects all-flash SSDs to be a relatively small part of the overall storage market. What he does see as a growth area is the use of tiered arrays that blend SSDs with disks as well.

"Compellent does it for Dell, 3Par for HP, EMC has it in all their products, NetApp does it a little bit differently with caching and Sun-Oracle does it... it's important technology," he said.

Huawei Symantec was established as a joint venture between the two companies in 2008 to provide products that blend the companies' high-level of knowledge of networking and security together.

Pricing and availability details for the Dorado 2100 are not yet available.