Banner
Backup D.R. Replication Virtualisation Hardware/Media Privacy

Current Filter: Storage>>>>>Technology Focus>

PREVIOUS

Filtered Articles:4 of 22   Current Article ID:5415

NEXT



Making 'dollar-sense' out of Flash

Editorial Type: Technology Focus     Date: 03-2015    Views: 3028      





New ways of deploying Flash are reinforcing economic arguments that will see a growth in the market for 'Big Data Flash', argues Marcos Burnett, Sales Director for Northern Europe, SanDisk.

According to IDC, over the next five years, more than 95% of all IT expenditure will go towards the "third platform" of computing infrastructure (cloud computing, big data, mobile computing and the Internet of Things). Older storage infrastructures are not suited to handle the scale of many of the processes required for the current and emerging world, such as evolving workloads, intense and high demand scalability and resource agility.

This has been the principal driver for the changing expenditure. Traditional HDDs, for example, are better for capacity-intensive environments that not only require a low dollar-per-gigabyte cost for capacity but also need relatively few inputs/outputs per second or IOPS per gigabyte. However, using the same approach in today's data intensive world would not be economical at all and IDC has spoken at length about the potential of Flash to dominate spinning disk in the performance intensive storage environments.

MANIFOLD RETURNS
Flash arrays have a higher performance throughput, which means fewer arrays to manage the same workloads. Additionally, as workload capacities demand higher throughput rates (measured in inputs/outputs per second or IOPS), many enterprises are finding their workloads are perfectly positioned for Flash's cost-to-performance ratio. As well as reducing the need for storage over provisioning, Flash-based SSDs require much less power for running and cooling than HDDs, especially once IT managers run de-duplication and installed less capacity to begin with. With power in the data centre usually in the top three IT operating costs, alongside people costs and data centre space, any reduction in these generates significant savings to the business.

Hitting all of them at once, as you can with Flash, brings manifold returns. Also, deploying Flash within storage arrays built significantly to take advantage of Flash based media will result in lower storage administration. Revolutionary internal architecture completely eliminates complex set-up and tuning steps, while inherently delivering maximum performance. Given that a single tier of Flash based media will be deployed there is no more management of storage tiers and the 'chasing of performance hotspots'.

However, though Flash is the only storage solution that is able to adequately cope with the demands of the third platform, until recently it has not been available at a reasonable enough price point for many, as the dollar-per-gigabyte cost has been a large barrier to entry into the secondary market. Though the absolute cost of Flash storage has been coming down significantly over the last few years, making the relative cost per TB of storage more attractive than ever in a Flash vs. traditional array, the applications in the secondary market have been unable to justify the cost of Flash, as they are unable to take advantage of conventional Flash performance to fully leverage secondary economic benefits.

SECONDARY BENEFITS
To make Flash appealing to these markets, it is important to understand how the secondary economic benefits of Flash (lower device count, lower energy consumption and reduced floor space requirements) would apply in secondary storage environment. If one makes the conservative assumption that Flash can achieve a data reduction ratio of 2:1 for secondary stage workloads and a conservative 20% lower device count, and that a Flash-based medium was available at roughly $0.40 per gigabyte for raw capacity by 2018, a Flash-based configuration would cost roughly the same as a storage solution built out of performance optimised HDDs priced at $0.183 per gigabyte and would have a 40-80% lower TCO.

To compare a Flash-based configuration with a storage solution built entirely out of capacity-optimised HDDs, we would have to assume that we'd need 4 times the number of devices to meet IOPS requirements, a number that significantly raises not only the acquisition cost but also the TCO of the solution.



Page   1  2

Like this article? Click here to get the Newsletter and Magazine Free!

Email The Editor!         OR         Forward ArticleGo Top


PREVIOUS

                    


NEXT