Enterprise flash drive technology got a boost last week with several announcements. EMC unveiled a package that incorporates EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 storage systems containing EFD with Oracle Database Applications to improve application performance. Meanwhile, the Storage Networking Industry Association took up the EFD cause with the launch of a Solid State Disk Initiative for enterprise and consumer applications.

EMC’s announcement is the first to use EFDs for Oracle applications. The company claims that EFDs deliver more than 30 times the input/output operations than the fastest disk drives. Because of the speed of flash drives, they can replace many Fibre Channel drives and because they do not contain mechanical ports, they consume less energy.

EFD is not new for EMC – the company launched flash drives for Symmetrix DMX storage array in January of this year. What is new is that this is the first application – Oracle databases – that flash has been applied to. When EMC introduced flash drives, the company said that it was for a small number of customers who were running transactional applications – Oracle is one of them.

SNIA too has taken advantage of the interest in flash drives as a Tier 0 storage solution. Its initiative called the Solid State Storage Initiative has drawn an number of vendors including EMC, Fusion-IO, Intel, Seagate Emulex, HP, Sun and IBM. Sun had previously rallied support for EFDs by announcing that it would incorporate the technology into its servers.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.