What if you could double the number of clients your business serves, deliver products to market 50% faster, and do it at near or less than your current storage spend! Would you do it? Of course, you would. And these are just a few of the reasons why Solid State Flash systems will be the standard for Tier 1 data in the very near future.
You can have it all, and you can have it now. An article via Evaluator Group asserts that “Tier 1 storage purchases will be all solid-state in 3 years; 5 years on the outside for the enterprise data center.” We also see this trend, and there are signs that many systems could achieve this in the next year.
Advantages of Solid-State Systems (click to tweet)
Of course, one of the most important advantages of solid-state storage is that it contains no mechanical parts. What this means for your business is speed, reliability and efficiency—plus the reduced cost of power!
It is well known that solid-state systems provide faster and more consistent input/output (I/O) times. Solid-state allows data transfer to and from storage to take place at a much higher speed-reducing latency without limiting capacity. Since solid-state storage devices have zero seek time, they are much faster than HDDs, especially for random read/write operations.
In addition to speedy performance, solid-state storage provides a more predictable lifespan for storage media. Data integrity and endurance are not diminished with improved speed and efficiency.
I like that solid-state is more energy efficient. It requires less power and cooling than its electromechanical equivalents. Without rotating platters, motors and movement, solid-state systems just consume less power. As we see technologies continue to play a role in the future of energy, this will help reduce worry about surging power needs or associated costs while the cost per Kwh continues to rise. And, it will mean more reliability in the data center.
Finally, Solid State Systems generally weigh less. This can be important when planning space for data center needs. All in all, solid-state systems offer functionality that will improve customer experience.
Flash Storage Systems — Faster and with Full Tier 1 Functionality (click to tweet)
Flash-based Solid State systems have developed speed and agility. With Flash, data can be stored in single-level or multi-level cell flash memory cells. Data is grouped into pages, and the pages are organized into blocks for efficient I/O and searchability. For efficiency, read and write operations are page-oriented while erase operations apply only to entire blocks. Scalability of Flash storage delivers a sustainable advantage – allowing you to scale from a single application to a consolidated cloud.
Flash Storage can help you consolidate and accelerate applications, virtualization, infrastructure and database access. Re-inventing the enterprise storage experience, enterprise flash drives are designed for applications requiring high I/O performance, reliability, energy efficiency and, more recently, consistent performance. This technology gives you top performance in a compact size – providing up to 120TB in just 3U (just over 5″ high) and using less power than a toaster oven.
Declining Costs For Solid State Systems (click to tweet)
Typical economics—as solid-state technology matures, we see prices decline with growing user acceptance leading to increased demand and production volumes.
Solid-state storage technology is not new, however interest in how the technology can be used to improve enterprise storage has been growing recently. Part of this trend is due to price reductions. And, as mentioned above, hardware performance also plays a role—processor speeds and read-and-write times continue to increase.
The most impressive part for me is the fundamental impact that this technology has on our clients’ ability to build and accelerate their businesses. In order to reduce total storage costs, it has been the practice to assign different categories of data to different types of storage media. In a tiered storage environment, cost efficiencies are reached by storing important data on more expensive, higher-performing storage systems while less critical data is stored on less expensive, lower-performing storage. Tier 1 high-performance hard disks are typically used to store critical or frequently accessed data. With declining costs, it is predicted that solid-state storage will replace hard disk storage if silicon factories can meet the increasing demand for products and the price for SSS continues to decline.
