Earlier this year, SiliconANGLE’s own Maria Deutscher penned an article on QLogic’s FabricCache and how it could be well positioned for the flash storage revolution. This new adapter bridges the chasm between servers by allowing direct-attached storage, typically unable to be shared between servers, to connect embedded SSDs with SAN.

According to Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman, “QLogic is an arms supplier to the storage world. It makes adapters, and this is really another adapter. While it is related to flash, QLogic is not making flash, not getting into the flash business.” Miniman goes on to offer the prediction that flash will, within the next three to four years, negate demand for high-speed disk-based systems.

However, in the present storage market, flash is still more expensive per byte to implement than traditional disk storage. This presents a challenge to IT professionals to identify and transfer lesser accessed files to disk while maintaining oft accessed material on the faster, more easily accessible flash storage.

However, that time intensive task may have just gotten much, much easier. According to Jordan Novet, writing for gigaom, Google has developed a traffic-recognition algorithm, named Janus, (after the obscure Roman god of doorways, beginnings and transitions), that takes much of the guesswork out of caching data by recognizing items that have not been accessed for some time.

As Novet states, “[Janus] operates by enforcing policies on when data needs to get kicked out of flash and shunted to disk. In determining whether a workload is worth of getting written to flash, the system considers how old the data is.” He continues, “That’s because most I/O activity is done on newly created files. Generally speaking, new workloads get special treatment on flash before getting ushered to disk.”

Recognizing the benefit Janus could offer to IT departments, Google presented a paper at the USENIX conference on their new program. In it, they state their engineers are looking to flash as “a cost-effective complement to disks in data centers.” The paper claims the Janus algorithm allows 28 percent of read operations to be served from flash by placing one percent of their data on flash.

Looking to the horizon, it is becoming ever more clear that a company’s profitability and viability will hinge on the appropriate balance between flash and disk storage. QLogic and Google have shown that they want to lead the way.