Does flash meet all future storage needs?
If you look at the storage industry before Pure entered the market, most of the technology in use was more than 20 years old. It was designed long before the advent of cloud computing and flash memory.
We came to market and said there is an opportunity to deliver storage that actually costs less to buy and is at least 10 times better in every dimension that businesses care about. It's 10 times faster, it's 10 times denser, it's 10 times more power efficient, and it's way more than 10 times reliable. Flash is 50 times more reliable than a mechanical disk. This collection of innovation in software, in hardware, in harnessing the cloud computing model and changing the business model completely changes the storage landscape. All of the legacy technology will be replaced with brand new technology.
What is Pure's core competency?
Pure Storage is the leading provider of All-Flash storage solutions. Flash has brought speed and efficiency to every aspect of computing: smart phones, Web searches, social media, and more. But cost has kept the broad deployment of flash out of the data centre. Pure Storage changes this through an entirely new platform that provides the best attributes of flash memory, the most advanced operating system in enterprise flash and the greatest hardware architecture ever designed for enterprise flash applications. Thanks to our efforts, we have been named a leader two years in a row in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays. A copy of the report can be found here: http://www.purestorage.com/company/news-and-events/press/pure-storage-named-gartner-magic-quadrant.html
Two key capabilities set us apart from the competition:
- Resiliency, compatibility and scalability: Today's typical flash appliances come up short of the enterprise array feature set, delivering small footprints of flash, with minimal or no redundancy across the controller nodes or flash cards. Such designs leave high availability an exercise for the end user. The FlashArray is a fully redundant enterprise array in terms of its reliability, with controller software that self-heals from media failures. Moreover, the FlashArray supports standard array interconnects (like Fibre Channel) and scales from 10s to 100s of TBs.
- Lower cost than performance disk: Virtually all of the flash solutions on the market today cost five to 10 times more in terms of dollars per GB usable than disk-based solutions. We accomplish this with high performance inline deduplication and compression. Deduplication and compression are powerful technologies popularised in the backup world to save space, but to date they have not been effective for primary storage because of performance. It turns out that deduplication and compression can actually improve the performance of an all-flash array: data dispersion helps flash take advantage of flash's higher parallelism, and reducing the number of writes (the more difficult operation for flash) can extend the life of the flash. Pure Storage has built global, inline deduplication and compression right into the fabric of the Pure Storage FlashArray, resulting in 5-20 times data reduction in even the most performance sensitive applications.
What are customers' top concerns around moving to flash storage?
Many customers are tied into legacy disk infrastructure that typically gets more expensive to maintain and manage over time - customers have to invest more on these technologies in order to meet their performance requirements. Flash storage provides this and more over a much longer life cycle, without the needing to expand data centre footprint.
What should be the top considerations in determining potential flash ROI?
The enterprise needs to consider issues such as power, cooling, space, lifespan of the product, maintenance renewals, both CAPEX and OPEX costs, upgrade costs, software licensing and data reduction. Factors that are particularly relevant in the South African and African context are power, cooling and data centre space saving.
When considering migration to all flash, enterprises should insist on a proof of concept - this is a good way to test the technology and ensure it will fit your requirements and deliver the expected returns.
Why should enterprises in SA embrace flash?
As mentioned, the era of flash storage is definitely here. Flash storage is ready for large-scale use by companies of every size, from enterprises to SMEs. Thanks to new technologies, companies can benefit from the advantages of using flash drives for storage.
Pure Storage has identified the following key reasons why companies can no longer do without this technology:
1. Flash is capable of harnessing the data explosion
Companies are still struggling with tight IT budgets, whilst trying to manage large amounts of data. IDC has predicted that the amount of data will increase by more than 50% each year over the next few years. This will only increase the demand for storage systems. Moreover, these days companies are demanding higher performance, more power, and efficiency, as a result of new technology initiatives such as cloud computing, virtualisation and big data. Speed is becoming increasingly more important for companies; they require higher efficiency and better response to maintain competitive advantage. All flash storage provides better performance than legacy mechanical disk drives - it is a no brainer for organisations looking to get ahead.
2. Flash storage is a business enabler
One of the greatest benefits of all-flash storage is performance. Companies have faster access to data so that they can process more transactions and speed up applications and services, leading to increased performance and a competitive advantage as a business. For example, all-flash storage is:
- Helping hospitals improve healthcare services, enabling doctors to focus on patient care;
- Making manufacturers more productive, enabling advanced yield analytics and real-time supplier integration;
- Driving disruption of traditional education, offering more immersive and responsive online learning experiences to students;
- Helping e-commerce companies improve conversion rates and reduce abandoned shopping carts;
- Enabling financial services providers to build complex analytical models in minutes instead of days or hours;
- For online infrastructure service providers, all-flash storage helps reduce the cost of service delivery while speeding new, differentiated services to market.
3. The technology has developed at a fast pace over the past five years
The sea change from mechanical spindles to flash is upending the primary storage market with rapid adoption. Flash technology has undergone tremendous development during the past five years, whereby flash storage has become a lot more affordable and plug-and-play compatible, thus an excellent solution for companies of any size. In the decade ahead, flash memory will push hard drives out of the latency path of performance intensive applications. On the consumer side, the transition to all flash storage is well under way with the proliferation of smart phones and tablets; we will increasingly see this same transition in the enterprise.
4. Flash is more affordable
The most common misconception is that all-flash storage is unaffordable. Thanks to a range of deduplication, compression and other data reduction methods, flash storage solutions can be offered at more affordable prices. Therefore, the costs per gigabyte can therefore be significantly lower compared to disk storage.
5. Disk no longer fit for purpose
When establishing a real time enterprise, you not only have to consider the software aspects, but also the performance of the entire IT infrastructure, because there must be no bottlenecks. Disk is too slow to increase IT infrastructure efficiency and productivity. However, all-flash storage can help boost efficiency and productivity, especially now that it can pay for itself in about a year (according to Forrester TEI report).
6. A great option for companies of all sizes
The use of consumer grade MLC flash in combination with advanced software to process enterprise workloads can ensure that flash is available for an affordable price. In the past, only large companies could afford flash. Thanks to consumer grade MLC flash, enterprises and SMEs can take advantage of flash storage. This affordability combined with the operational simplicity of flash products means that training and operational overheads for any company size are among the smallest in the industry.
7. High performance, low latency
Although most IT environments and applications will benefit from an all-flash storage array, it will be those that require high performance and low latency who will be able to see the biggest improvement. Virtualised servers and virtual desktop environments require high performance despite very randomised workloads, which an all-flash environment is the perfect solution for.
8. Future proofing
Today's storage arrays are a five-year investment including commissioning, use and migration at end of life. Moore's Law is driving exponential increases in workloads so the storage being deployed today needs to be able to sustain workloads from servers and applications in 2020. Existing disk-based technology will not be able to meet that future requirement for capacity, power consumption or performance, flash is the only existing technology that can do this.
9. Long-term time and cost savings
The long-term savings are associated with all-flash arrays are not to be ignored. Companies are able to reduce their OPEX costs by reducing energy usage. At the same time, they are also optimising power and cooling usage in the data centre, while requiring less space for the actual storage array. With a simple user interface, maintenance and management of these systems can be significantly minimised, freeing up people to spend time on more strategic projects. The capacity can also be increased easily and routine upgrades can take place without interruption, and without adversely affecting performance.
Download the Forrester TEI report here.
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