EMC has declared 2016 to be "the year of all-flash" for primary storage, and at least one South African company - as well as National Treasury - appear to agree.
As data storage costs increase, businesses face the choice of sticking with traditional storage infrastructure, or investing in flash memory. All-flash data arrays deliver better performance and are now comparable in cost to hard drive arrays, says EMC.
Josh Goldstein, EMC's primary storage strategy VP, told delegates at EMC World 2016 in Las Vegas this week that back in 2007, the all-flash market was small and expensive to deploy.
Nine years later, EMC released an array called Unity, with an entry-level price of around R150 000. It's been designed as an all-flash array, but also comes as a hybrid flash and disk, or a software-only virtual storage appliance.
Jonas Bogoshi, EMC's country manager for Southern Africa, said National Treasury has two all flash XtremIO arrays, and recently bought the first VMAX all-flash system in the EMEA region.
Bogoshi, speaking in Las Vegas, said Treasury was using the arrays for analytics at the Government Technical Advisory Centre. The XtremIO array can store six times more data than traditional disk-based systems, he noted.
"They went live on 25 April, and now we're going to see what benefits they're going to get. They're way ahead of everybody."
He said before Treasury's investment in all-flash storage, an analytics project had taken a day-and-a-half to complete. The task could now be completed in under three hours.
Bogoshi said insurer Hollard had reported that running backups had begun to overlap with its production cycle. "So they had to decide: do we open late, or do we not complete the backup?"
He added that Hollard also invested in an XtremIO all-flash array, allowing it to run backups while continuing its day-to-day business.
Flash era?
Mick Turner, technical marketing manager in the enterprise and mid-range systems division, noted all all-flash arrays are now affordable for small and medium businesses.
In any event, he said, at some point it will end up all-flash because there is so much investment in manufacturing flash drives.
In addition, capacities on flash drives are getting bigger than spinning media.
He said the performance that all-flash makes possible allows companies to do tasks they were never able to do before, such as real-time analysis of marketing or real-time fraud detection.
A use case for an all-flash array, said Turner, could involve big data analytics to continuously monitor a city's electricity consumption.
Another case involved a hospital installing an XtremIO array to run a summary on patient activity. Before the installation, the report - drawn from a massive database - could only be generated once a day. Once the array had been installed, the report could be run every hour, resulting in greater efficiencies so that 50 000 more patients could be seen every year.
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