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Hybrid storage arrays are known for balancing the performance benefits between solid state with the cost and capacity benefits of hard disk storage, yielding advantages greater than the sum of their parts. The market and the investment community has signalled their approval of hybrid arrays through customer deployments, Nimble Storage's successful IPO, tempered by the tough times for all-flash array provider Violin Memory.

Why is there such faith in the hybrid array? Flash storage captures the imagination because of its spectacular speed, but the bottom line still matters. Hybrid arrays can fulfil the majority of workloads at a fraction of the cost of all-flash systems, and user requirements don't vary greatly. Acceptable performance and appropriate capacity are expected, along with data protection, affordability, efficiency and ease of use. While hybrid storage addresses these factors well, buyers still need to determine what applications, data services, and architectures offer best value.

The first value concern is whether the system uses SSDs with DRAM and flash throughout the data path, with the SSDs serving as a high-speed cache with permanent storage on spinning disk. Using SSDs throughout the data path distributes the performance boost of flash to all applications. Deep integration of SSD and caching can benefit even applications whose data ultimately lands on hard disk drives. Using SSD as a tier of storage, even for sub-volume tiering is not viable in today's volatile environments.

In data centres with silos of storage (NAS/SAN, Fibre Channel and iSCSI/NFS and CIFS) a hybrid array should function effectively with both block and file protocols. Rather than attempting to work with multiple or specific storage platforms to satisfy different application requirements, hybrid storage delivers better value when it provides unified access for NAS/SAN.

Inline, on-the-fly deduplication and compression (not post-process) on SSD and hard disk will significantly reduce the cost of storage while having a multiplier effect on performance from flash. Optimising all resources and application data, not just secondary applications throughout the array, can result in a reduction of up to 75 percent less overall capacity used and a performance increase by a factor of ten. Built-in data protection such as automated and unlimited snapshots, remote and VM-aware replication and fully redundant metadata storage safeguards against even catastrophic disk failure for continued availability, and without any need for third-party solutions or extra software licenses.

With nearly 60 percent of enterprise x86 workloads running in a VM, support for virtual servers may seem like a given, but it complicates an evaluation of cost per terabyte and cost per IOPS. Hybrid storage features should render server virtualisation more scalable and cost effective, not more complex. Users should be able to manage more VMs, mitigate or eliminate wear-levelling, and reduce latency if spinning disk provides capacity and SSD powers performance. This extends to VDI management as well, since features like dedupe/compression and unlimited snapshots/cloning permit more hosted virtual desktops and mass hypervisor deployment in significantly less time.

Properly equipped hybrid arrays are excellent for storing, accelerating, and protecting high-update databases. Write-intensive index files and other volumes can reside on separate disks to log files. Volumes on SSD run at the highest performance without a hit from caching algorithms or tiering polices. This allows DBAs to achieve the flash-grade performance for high transaction volumes without incurring the costs traditionally associated with high RPM disk drives.

Hybrid storage marries the economic best of SSD and HDD and with a well-developed feature set and range of data services it can supply value beyond high IOPS and low latency. With efficient optimisation, high capacity, scalability and data protection as well, it is little wonder that hybrid solutions continue to gain traction over their all-flash alternatives.