Storage Technology Solutions Transforming Data Center

an operating expense perspective, flash is a real bargain.

At the same time, the cost curve for flash, driven mostly by consumer applications and Moore’s Law, is plummeting, expected to drop another 75% per gigabyte sometime in the next two years. While disk has run out of gas technically, flash costs are falling fast and densities are rising geometrically.

From a business perspective, enterprise-grade Flash Storage Platforms are transforming the ability of companies – entire industries, really to grow existing revenue streams, find new ones and make better decisions faster, and transform their competitiveness.

Violin has documented used cases showing flash storage can reduce transaction time in banking environments (more profit), accelerate inventory reporting in retail (more efficiency) and deliver data-oriented billing opportunities– in wireless telco environments (more revenue).

Beyond the opportunities to grow revenue or gain competitive advantage by using flash for primary storage, business leaders are also seeing the significant favorable impact of flash on CapEx and OpEx when disk and the I/O bottleneck is removed.

The True Cost of Ownership savings can be enormous, when all relevant costs are considered. The densities available in flash storage today and the roadmap for tomorrow mean visionary IT leaders,can deliver today’s application performance needs, cut power and cooling costs, consolidate the storage footprint in their data centers, and be well positioned to support data growth for years to come. Be sure to challenge your IT, Facilities and Finance teams to capture all the cost differences at storage refresh time. Some of these savings will cross organizational boundaries.

A Word of Caution

It is also becoming clear to an ever-increasing number of IT leaders that “solid state drive” technology (SSD) is not a simple synonym with “flash” or the best technology implementation for data center applications as the SSD is packaged to look, feel, and act like a legacy disk drive. It is becoming clear that architecture matters.

A purpose built, zero downtime architecture that accesses flash at the individual chip level gives users the benefit of optimized performance, endurance, data protection, efficiency and value. SSD’s while superior in the mobile world, could be dead for enterprise data center applications, like legacy hard disk drives because SSDs hold back the true power of flash by constraining it with the HDD form factor and an ancient disk protocol.

The impact that a carefully thought-out, fully integrated architecture, design and implementation can have on storage availability, reliability, performance and the ability to deliver a complete suite of tightly integrated, highly optimized data protection and data efficiency services simply cannot be overstated.

Technical experts in the organization should carefully evaluate not just the punch list of features, but how those features are implemented in order to accurately assess the potential benefit to your organization.

The Conversation Expands

Chris Mellor, writing in the online publication, The Register, recently put it this way: “Developing proprietary flash cards can lead to lower power budgets, less heat generation, and faster data access times compared to standard SSD or PCIe form factors.”

A recently released IDC White Paper, commissioned by Violin Memory, stated “The company Violin has chosen a custom flash module (CFM) based architecture, and is leveraging the advantages of the visibility this provides at the individual cell level to drive higher performance, better efficiency, and lower cost.”

Perhaps Eric Burgener, Research Director, for the Storage practice at IDC put it best when he said

“AFAs will become the enterprise storage workhorses of record for all tiers of primary applications, as TCO benefits of flash deployment at scale are just too compelling relative to HDD-based platforms.”

Today’s technology leaders get that. Today’s CIO heroes get that.