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As 2014 comes to a close, multiple innovations in data centre and storage technology have emerged to place the possibility of a Flash Transformed Data Centre (FTDC) within reach. Triggered by companies looking to address the "mismatch" between increasing processor speeds and storage based on mechanically-driven hard-disk drives (HDDs), the rise of FTDC will address the mismatch in I/O data transfer that has caused noticeable slowdowns in enterprise workloads.

As a result, flash now appears everywhere-across all areas data centre infrastructure: i.e. all-flash storage arrays, servers, and integrated systems with converged infrastructure. More importantly, now flash-based storage solutions can also be accelerated even further through the use of data centre software solutions that flow across many computing tiers - web-serving, application-serving and database-serving.

But there are other factors driving this shift. First, solid state drives (SSDs) have become more reliable and have taken on more enterprise features to ensure that data isn't lost. This step makes flash reliable enough to store mission-critical information.

Additionally, many storage solutions are now able to take advantage of the full performance benefits that flash delivers versus HDDs, such as significantly improved IOPS performance, lower power consumption and heat emission, as well as lower latency - which allows flash to serve up today's read/write intensive applications, such as Big Data analytics, cloud computing, VDI, virtualisation, and more. These data-intensive applications-which are fuelling today's businesses - will never be able to be served up with the processing power of an HDD.

The advantages of using flash in the data centre don't stop there. Today, flash extends to almost every layer of the data centre and is deployed in multiple flavours to fit into existing infrastructure, whether it is in SATA, SAS, PCIe or even DIMM slots. It also opens up new server system design opportunities in order to meet evolving application needs.

For example, increasing numbers of companies are exploring the ways that flash can accelerate transactional enterprise applications like ERP functions, online transaction processing, video on demand and other forms of content delivery. Flash storage will increase the speed, performance and agility of not only the data centre, but the enterprise as a whole-which is a must for CIOs who are continually challenged to maintain budgets and lower total cost of ownership to enable the flash empowered workforce.

Next, we have seen SSDs gain further ground on HDDs when it comes to capacity. This year has seen SSDs in a standard 2.5-inch form factor reach capacities of 4TB-8TB. Combined with the cost of flash continuing to fall will allow SSDs to reach near cost parity with HDDs. This coupled with the energy, efficiency, scalability, and performance benefits of SSDs will lead to further penetration of flash in the data centre and make flash a viable option for archiving and other cold storage applications. I have no doubt that 2015 will be the year that SSDs eliminate the use of 15K HDDs in the data centre.

We will also see vertically integrated flash storage providers continue to drive down the costs of solid state memory and take on workloads in the near-line and archival tiers of the data centre that traditionally belonged to SATA HDDs. With these advantages across multiple tiers of storage, the reality of the flash transformed data centre will manifest itself sooner rather than later.

These advances mean that flash storage will continue to drive the implementation of Big Data analytics and allow businesses to make more informed decisions. Flash will also allow for faster processing and more VMs per server, providing greater compute density. The improvements in performance will make it possible to store, access and analyse Big Data in real time, which is essential for integral applications such as fraud detection.

Over the last year, increased attention has been given to Memory Channel Storage (MCS) technology, making the conversion from storage to memory possible. New storage technologies, such as SanDisk's ultra-low latency ULLtraDIMM SSD, address application latency challenges, while delivering a cost-effective storage solution that achieves DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) performance.

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