Fast and expensive. That pretty much sums up the way most IT people see Flash storage.
No wonder some have likened all-Flash arrays to the data center equivalent of a sports car. But those people are only seeing one aspect of what is actually a very flexible technology. For example, you could make the argument that all-Flash arrays behave more like a bus, squeezing everything into a single, smaller enclosure. Or, in the case of hybrid Flash arrays, that the characteristics are more like that of a hybrid electric/gas car, providing an optimal mix of low cost and high performance.
However you see it, one thing is certain: Flash storage is not a flash in the pan. In fact, over the next five years, some analysts are predicting that all-Flash arrays will take the data center by storm, replacing and eventually eclipsing the less flashy but infinitely more practical (from a cost perspective) disk-based storage systems. What will it take for Flash to take off as the storage workhorse in the data center? Here are five trends that make Flash storage a practical choice for the future:
1. Flash will get cheaper.
Right now, Flash storage is about 2X the cost of disk storage, terabyte for terabyte. In five years, however, Flash could become 5X cheaper than disk storage as industry adoption drives better cost efficiencies in Flash technology (according to a recent Wikibon report). Flash storage faster and cheaper? That’s a game changer right there.
2. Big data will get bigger.
As the Internet of Everything arrives, the amount of analyzable data will explode—particularly in areas such as sensor-based data. That means enterprises will need to analyze lots of data very quickly, the natural milieu of the all-Flash array. As enterprises depend more upon big data applications to drive business insights, more of that data will move into a Flash environment.
3. Data centers will get smaller.
Cloud, converged and, now, hyperconverged infrastructure is shrinking the data center footprint. It’s only logical that IT departments would want to shrink their storage systems too as they ease themselves out of the hardware maintenance business. Flash arrays are natural space savers, using technologies such as data compression and deduplication to deliver as high as nearly 20X more efficient capacity storage than traditional disk storage.
4. Virtualization and Centralization are here to stay.
There’s no putting the virtual machine genie back into the bottle now. Enterprises are also changing the way they look at data, seeing it as a business resource that should be centrally available to every application rather than siloed in separate databases. Flash storage really begins to make sense in a centralized, virtualized environment where multiple applications are accessing the same stored data.
5. The cloud will only get more crowded.
As more of IT moves into the cloud, real-time access to data becomes critical. Whether its personal data deployed as part of a virtual desktop initiative, or electronic health records serving a network of providers, Flash delivers performance at scale that disk storage simply cannot match. ▪
Sponsored by EMC XtremIO