EMC is claiming to be the first storage vendor to incorporate solid state Flash memory in its products.

The new Symmetrix DMX-4 73GB and 146GB storage units use Flash memory which EMC says is 30 times faster than standard magnetic recording devices and consumes barely a third of the power of older devices.

"For years, magnetic disk drive technology has defined performance boundaries for mission critical storage environments," said David Donatelli, president of EMC's storage division.

The drives cost around 30 times as much as standard media, and the initial customer base is expected to be limited to highly time-dependent sectors like financial trading houses.

Steve Duplessie, senior analyst at The Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "EMC is the first enterprise infrastructure player to incorporate Flash disk into their arrays, which should give them a huge performance advantage at the very sector of the market that always seems to need more and more.

"If it creates as big a gap in real-life transaction processing shops as it does on paper, this could very well be one of those killer advantages that only appear every 10 to 15 years."