When it comes to high-performance workloads, Flash lives up to its name.
The industry loves to talk about how Flash-based memory is perfect for applications that need low latency and lots of data processing power under pressure, such as the 8:00 AM storm that hits a data center when everyone boots their virtual desktop at the same time. But there’s a lot more substance to Flash than just speed.
EMC is one company that truly understands the power of Flash. Their XtremIO Flash-based storage system is fast, sure, but it also addresses some of those other pain points that CIOs are feeling around storage these days, like size and cost. One of the ways it does this is through innovative data de-duplication technology that allows enterprises to replicate data snapshots without re-creating the data.
On the surface, data de-duplication doesn’t sound very exciting, I’ll admit. So EMC did a case study of an enterprise that was running a 39 TB Oracle database on a traditional RAID storage system. It turned out that most of those terabytes were actually copies of the database that the enterprise was using for testing and development. Because XtremIO creates database instances using data links instead of duplicating the data, the enterprise was able to shrink its database down to 1.5 terabytes with XtremIO! You can bet they were pretty excited about that.
Of course, when things get smaller they also tend to get cheaper. A side-by-side comparison of XtremIO versus traditional RAID storage reveals an 86% reduction in the number of drives needed, a 75% reduction in housing and power costs, and a 30% reduction in total cost of ownership over three years. All of which makes the 300% performance improvement seem almost incidental (okay, not really, but you get the point).
What all of this means is that CIOs don’t need to start the Flash conversation talking about speed. Telling your CFO that you can improve analytic performance by X percent probably won’t light a fire underneath them to approve your budget request. Telling them you can make your data center a whole lost faster AND a whole lot cheaper will get their attention a lot sooner.
At Rolta AdvizeX, we can help put the numbers and the strategy behind the business case for Flash storage. We’ll assess the storage system you have today, identify the applications you need to run on it, and meet with business users to find out what really needs to run faster and what can wait. And if you have questions about virtualization, big data or the Cloud, we can help you there too. ▪