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Indeed, flash has materialised as being excellent for specialised workloads that require high speed reads such as databases, but it is not largely a cost-effective solution for all workloads and still makes up a very small fraction of the overall installed storage base. On the other side of the spectrum, low-cost SATA disk drives continue to advance and use new technologies like helium to support huge capacities, up to 10 TB per drive, but they are not highly performant and are comparatively slow. We were lulled into believing that customers will shift 100% to 'all flash' utopia, but in reality, it is not practical due to the costs involved, and the large installed base of storage that must be addressed. What seems to be missing is the smart software to help unify the new world of flash with the existing and still evolving world of disks.

The market for SATA drives, due to their low cost, has not slowed down and there is a need to balance both flash and SATA technologies to get the most out of an enterprise's storage investment and effectively utilise all its storage resources. Each flash vendor is trying to create a stack of flash services but they are starting anew, which is preventing many of them from going to the next level since they don't have competitive differentiation.

POOLING RESOURCES
Here's where established and dedicated third party software-defined storage can look at both technologies simply as containers of data, and can apply a comprehensive suite of storage services on top of either flash or SATA drives. For instance, DataCore provides the most powerful enterprise-class flash stack in the industry, as it is easy to create a shared storage pool out of the internal flash and disk storage resources available to a server or to integrate flash or disks that are located externally.

In effect, software-defined storage can integrate and optimise any flash-based technology and disk-based devices as part of virtual SAN deployments or within an overall storage infrastructure. Software-defined storage can reconcile both worlds, and I see software as key to the unification of existing and new disk and flash technologies.

THE WRITE PROFILE
To further the point, look and see what's happening with SATA drive acceleration. Responding to our customer needs, DataCore is the first to provide a new random write accelerator for SATA drives. Again, flash is good for reads but not effective for write traffic, and SATA is much lower cost but slow. Write-intensive workloads include RAID-5 systems and critical transactional applications like databases, SharePoint, ERP, and on-line transaction processing. The Random Write Accelerator yields up to 30 times faster write performance for random-write-heavy workloads. The write performance speed-ups are most pronounced on SATA disk drives, where each write incurs significant rotational and seek delays to mechanically update blocks on spinning platters. This enables flash-like speed out of these lower-cost devices. Obviously, write-intensive workloads using flash also go faster.

ISLAND LIFE
Also, be aware of the creation of disparate islands. Each flash device has its own unique feature stack, but what happens when they need to work with others? These disjointed software stacks create "isolated islands of storage"; everything we have struggled to move away from in the past decade. Virtual SANs, converged systems, and flash devices have continued to proliferate, creating more separately managed machines and ultimately resulting in discrete islands of storage in the IT organisation. The capability to unify and federate these isolated storage islands by treating each of these scenarios as use cases under a unifying software-defined storage architecture can help solve this, driving management and functional convergence across the enterprise.

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