 "The Future Of Flash")
In today’s enterprise, enormous amounts of data are being generated from a variety of sources, such as applications, new mobile devices, big data analytics, and the cloud. This is changing the velocity at which enterprises do business and the scale at which business is conducted. For a CIO, managing vast quantities of data presents a challenge especially in an environment where storage budgets are limited and resources are constrained. The need of the hour is higher performance along with improved responsiveness to meet demanding business objectives.
An emerging option for many organisations is the all flash array. The all flash array storage market has been evolving, and continues to do so, as adoption and diversity of use cases increase. According to a recent IDC report, the enterprise flash market will grow to $4.5B by 2015. Without a doubt, Flash technology is acting as the catalyst of a transformation in the storage market especially given a pent-up demand for higher storage performance and accelerating applications.
Let us look at what is driving this upsurge in Flash deployments. Today, enterprises have become more aggressive than ever in finding a competitive advantage and providing improved and innovative services and products to their end customers. All-Flash Arrays, a new category of storage system based on flash technology address some of these requirements by enabling startling performance characteristics; capabilities that make it faster, reducing the delays inherent in a traditional mechanical hard disk environment, smaller, improving storage utilisation and efficiency without compromising performance and greener, optimising energy consumption compared to hard disk equivalents. This amalgamation, coupled with enhanced dependability and cost-performance benefits, indicates a profound impact on businesses, allowing them to re-evaluate their storage strategy and improve the ROI of IT investments.
While there are various start-up flash point products, the array of choices undoubtedly is a challenge for customers trying to decide on an optimal solution. Flash isn’t within the purview of only start-ups; tier one vendors use flash in some capacity and some already offer All-Flash Arrays. Designed to address extreme workloads, from database management to high performance computing (HPC), the tier one All Flash Array vendor trump cards are a proven track record, full customer support and an appreciation of the data platform as a key driver of enterprise success. These factors become even more important when you consider that the workloads suited to flash are often customer facing and business critical.
But before considering Flash, the CIO needs to be cognisant of the following:
Stability - Flash storage often wears out because the cells that collect charge cannot be discharged. Enterprise flash systems offer ways to balance wear and extend the life of the media, as well as features that proactively monitor the integrity of data.
ROI - The drop in flash pricing has been as dramatic as its rise in popularity. In 2009, SLC flash cost around $65 per GB whereas today the street price of a GB of eMLC flash is around $8. While that’s impressive, it’s important to remember that the cost of one GB of enterprise class hard disk space is around $0.65. This price difference raises questions about which workloads provide the desired return.
Optimisation - The flash storage market is still at a nascent stage. While making the right choice, one must look at the current and emerging flash technologies, and take the time to understand the pros and cons of each product.
It is very apparent that the flash marketplace is growing rapidly and stimulating a new direction for storage. This demand will continue to rise for the next two years. It may disrupt the tier one enterprise class disk category and redefine how we use mechanical hard disks; however, hard disks will remain and become de rigueur for capacity applications while flash will power performance. Flash storage will reach price equivalence with hard disks at some point in the future, but the landscape will be very diverse. Besides, new technologies such as Phase Change, Electron Spin Torque and Memristor are already waiting in the wings and demonstrating enhanced features over flash.
Flash will have a profound impact on the future of enterprise storage and system architectures. The benefits of the technology make the integration of flash an ideal choice of storage media to deliver the performance and efficiency in today’s digital economy. When integrated with enterprise reliability and scale, flash storage is poised to meet the requirements of the most demanding infrastructures.
Today’s business and technology leaders should look to solution providers that can provide a comprehensive portfolio to meet diverse enterprise workloads and those that have a strategic data platform and data services framework to help customers determine the optimal Flash solution for their specific needs.
The author is Director- Systems Engineer, NetApp Marketing & Services Pvt. Ltd India.
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