UPDATED 06:00 EDT / MARCH 08 2013

The Storage Food Chain: Mission Critical Workloads will Move to All-Flash, Hybrid

Flash has been a revolutionizing technology impacting enterprise and consumer storage alike.  From the data center to the USB port, flash storage has introduced new capabilities for storing and sharing data.  And this week’s been particularly huge for flash technology, given the number of related updates and product launches from some of the industry’s best.  Wikibon’s CTO David Floyer wrote up a piece on the latest news from one of these top players, EMC, exploring its news of an all flash array and a line of PCIe cards that can fit inside a server.  He deems the launch a significant milestone for the industry at large, and outlines where the market is headed.

Floyer writes that EMC’s entry into this space “legitimized the flash-only storage array market.” The company’s competitors – IBM, Dell, NetApp and Hitachi – are all or will soon be offering a pure-flash array of their own, but none of them possess EMC’s market share.

“There are a lot of flash-only vendors out there, [but] what this brings is the EMC label, the EMC sales force and EMC quality control. It doesn’t yet have things like replication on it…so there will be areas where the stable VMAX product from EMC will still be required, but over time that will be flushed out,” Floyer said.

Floyer forecasts that in 2013 and beyond, most mission critical workloads will be moved to flash arrays and hybrid systems. He believes that over the course of the next two to three years most frequently accessed data will be stored on SSDs, while disk-based solutions will take on the role of “capacity data farms” that house cold data.

Floyer adds that the greatest threat to all-flash arrays is the PCIe card, the same sort that EMC announced alongside its new system.  The reason is that SSDs that sit closer to the CPU offer much lower latency than an external array. Another advantage of server-side flash  is IO consistency, which means that IT departments don’t have to worry about latency spikes that may affect the experience – and productivity – of the end user.

Hear more from Floyer on EMC and Fusion-io’s latest moves in the flash game in the video below, from an earlier episode of the NewsDesk show with Kristin Feledy:


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