Tegile Systems, a provider of enterprise storage arrays that rely on flash to outperform traditional disk systems, announced a partnership with co-location provider Voonami. Under the agreement, Voonami’s managed replication service will be made available through the remote replication functionality built into Tegile’s hybrid Zebi box. The integration expands the two companies’ existing relationship. Previously, Voonami has deployed the Zebi 2600 array in its two data centers to boost the performance of cloud-based services.

Unlike hyperscale, hybrid storage is gaining serious traction beyond the realm of cloud service providers and technology-driven enterprises such as Facebook and Google. Wikibon co-founder and CTO David Floyer pinpointed the reason behind the technology’s momentum in a March article entitled “Hybrid Storage Poised to Disrupt Traditional Disk Arrays.”

Floyer analyzed the cost and performance of flash-first hybrid arrays and confirmed that they are vastly superior to traditional architectures. He discovered that an environment requiring 15,000 IOPS from 1 terabyte of usable storage would require 64 drives and 1 terabyte of flash cache in a traditional storage array, compared with 16 drives and 2.4 terabyes of flash in a full-blown hybrid system. In this test scenario the traditional array would cost more than twice as much as the latter: $190,000 versus a mere $88,000.

“For very large environments, flash-only arrays may be attractive, with a migration policy to capacity disk as the IO demands go down,” Floyer wrote in his post. “Over time, the lower relative cost of flash will continue, and flash-first arrays (either hybrid or flash-only) are likely to become the standard high-performance arrays.”

Scott Lowe, the founder of The 1610 Group, agrees that the hybrid storage has many advantages. The benefit offsets the risk, he wrote, but CIOs should not ignore the risks associated with buying into bleeding edge technology.