Bruce Trevarthen, group CEO of Cloud services company theCloud Ltd., and Vish Mulchand, director of Product Marketing for HP Storage, appeared on theCUBE at HP Discover 2015 to talk about the shift to all-flash. Mulchand is a big supporter.

“The initial deployers of all-flash have all had very good experiences,” he said. “They’ve been able to get predictable performance, they’ve been able to lower cost in many different dimensions, and feedback has been very positive. And what I’m hearing now is they want to do more. They want to do more applications on flash. They want to do more things on flash.”

Mulchand added that he doesn’t think the all-flash data center tipping point is that far away. “I know there’s been some in the community that have talked about this. It’s clearly on the leading edge.”

The cost differences between flash and other forms of storage

Trevarthen had a different view, given the cost differences between flash and other forms of storage.

“I’m probably more inclined to think it’s going to be a transition,” he said. “We’re using all-flash arrays now … and the key element there is performance. But you’re always going to have data that is not being used, that’s not in-flight, that’s not really accessed on a regular basis, so to put that on SSD seems a little overkill. And right now, today, the price point is not there to compete.”

But Mulchand believes that this difference in performance will help make flash the standard, even for applications where it’s not as necessary.

“The way I think about the all-flash data center is, OK, tape is not dead, disk is not dead … the question becomes, where is the center of deployment? Where is the center of innovation? Where is the lion’s share of spend?” The key question, he said, is, “If flash becomes somewhat ubiquitous in the data center, then what does that baseline infrastructure enable as capability? What use-cases?”

This is where flash really shines, despite its high apparent cost. Once multiple copies of data can be kept on the same array using snapshots, each copy takes up only a fraction of the capacity it would on disk. This makes the cost equation much more favorable — when the data is being used.

The capabilities of all-flash

Since switching to all-flash, however, Trevarthen said he is a big fan of the capabilities it opens up.

“If you’ve got the performance available, then it opens the door to do a whole bunch of things you never really thought of … We’re seeing a lot of customers placing bigger and bigger demands on us as a service provider that we could not actually accommodate under a spinning disk,” Trevarthen explained.

When they were still using a combination of flash and spinning disk, they “still could not meet the demands of the heavy spikes that we were seeing from some users, particularly some of our users in the Big Data space. They’re ingesting huge amounts of data very quickly and then doing nothing for a few days.”

This required building out their systems for capacity they only needed perhaps once a week.

Now, when it comes to customer performance, he says the company “can make big promises, back them up with an all-flash environment, and deliver on that promise.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HP Discover Las Vegas 2015.