Organisations across the Middle East and Mediterranean Africa (MEMA) are looking to flash memory as part of the foundation to help them address new business concerns, says HP.
Walid Gomaa, director, Storage Division for HP Middle East and Mediterranean Africa, said during a recent visit to South Africa that HP's experience across MEMA is that IDC predictions hold true in the region: flash is going mainstream.
"Both public sector organisations and large enterprises, particularly in the financial, telecoms and healthcare verticals, are eager to use real-time big data analysis to improve their efficiencies, service delivery and revenue generating capacity. Public sector entities are looking to big data analysis to improve service delivery and move to a smart city environment," he says. "Organisations cannot afford to wait months for analysis of trends and customer behaviour - they need real-time data. But to do so, organisations' data storage and processing ability must be overhauled."
Adam Day, storage category manager for English-speaking Africa, says now that HP has achieved a flash price per Gb comparable to that of spinning disk arrays - HP 3PAR thin deduplication: A competitive comparison, real-time big data analysis has come within reach of local enterprises, which may have had concerns about cost in the past.
Day explains the cost benefits of an all-flash array include the ability to intelligently avoid duplication and optimise the available capacity, as well as avoiding over-provisioning on storage - traditionally a necessity that saw enterprises provisioning for up to five years in advance. "Over-provisioning means the enterprises pay too much for storage capacity, since this is one area of IT where costs are continually dropping. In addition, the data explosion in recent years has shown us that it is extremely difficult to accurately predict what capacity will be needed in years to come," he says. "Flash allows you to provision only what you really need."
For the IT department, supporting the business's demands for intelligent analysis of a constantly-growing stream of data has become a challenge. Flash arrays enable IT to offer speed, cost efficiency, a smooth user experience and improved response times, he says.
Day says enterprises are looking beyond the capex costs of storage, to operational costs too. With flash, organisations can achieve significant savings on power and cooling, he says.
"But processing speed and cost are not the only important storage considerations," he notes. "Availability, reliability and security are equally crucial." He cites the example of healthcare organisations storing vast amounts of patient data: "In an emergency, doctors must have immediate access to patient records, and this data must be secure."
Gomaa says as public and private sector organisations in MEMA show increasing interest in flash, the region is seeing a number of early adopters. "It is coming faster than we expected, particularly among those organisations that deal with multinational partners which already have the ability to carry out real-time big data analysis. Local organisations are seeing the business case for flash."
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