Last week at SapphireNow I had a great chat with Lloyd Palfrey, a senor technical architect with Bluefin Solutions, one of the leading SAP services firms. I caught up with Lloyd at the bar (where the talk gets better as the night goes on) and had one of those conversations that gives a whole different perspective about the impact of data and what it means for the market.

The conversation centered on HANA and then turned to how the in-memory technology affects the storage market. The inverse is also true. The new Flash storage technologies are having an impact on the database market. And data is what makes the difference in it all.

Disruption

It’s a context to consider as EMC World starts this week. Storage vendor EMC is as disrupted by Flash as relational database vendors are disrupted by NOSQL and in-memory technologies.  As a note, EMC and VMware have a partnership with SAP to integrate HANA.  Another example to show it is not always as black and white as it appears.

To be fair, EMC and Oracle are making their own progress, with EMC  maintaining it has a flash first strategy. Last month they announced the acquisition of xtremIO, a pure Flash array company out of Israel. This week at EMC World,  Flash is at the center of the conversation. At Oracle OpenWorld, the company announced a NOSQL database.

Making the Comparison

The impact on traditional storage is the same as why relational databases have less relevance. Data is ubiquitous and flows at such velocity that it requires new methods to make the data readily accessible. NoSQL, for example, has the capability to do huge read/write workloads. Relational databases do not.

Hard-disk storage has a similar legacy issue as compared to relational databases. Hard-disk storage is limited by the mechanical disk, which can only move so fast. As with legacy databases, the hard drives do not handle large data volumes very well. The restricted I/O for a hard drive causes bottlenecks. As a result, IT administrators will add more big storage systems that require lots of space and more people to manage.

Data also serves as the basis for the comparisons between in-memory and Flash technologies. Both tecbnologies are well-suited to handle large data volumes. They are symbiotic technologies in many ways, comparable to the integrated environments of relational databases and traditional storage.

SAP Mentor  Sina Moatamed has a blog post that provides a strong analysis of the need for new Flash storage that fits with in-memory technology. He is more forceful than  I am in his declaration that “SAP Has Declared War on the Hard Drive Industry.” But his argument is a strong one.

Moatemed goes through the basics about HANA: How it works as a database that resides in-memory with a columnar architecture. How the read/write activity occurs in memory and writes to a traditional hard drive database. The hard drive database is needed for system restarts so it can load the database back into memory.

Do You Need a Data Warehouse and All That Goes With It?

During our conversation, Palfrey and I discussed how the data warehouse serves as an inflection point for consolidating the data center. The perspective parallels what Moatemed says in his post.

You won’t need a separate data warehouse to do your analytics. It will all happen in-memory. That in itself will cut in half the amount of infrastructure required with a traditional model.

Now take into consideration what comes with Flash. With a 100-terabyte HANA environment, you might need 5 racks for hard disk storage. But with Flash, the numbers drop precipitously:

In one single rack of equipment you could have the computing power to run the largest enterprise business systems. With a footprint this small, cloud providers can now operate greener, and more efficiently scale their infrastructures. This also means the age of the on-premise SaaS appliance has just become a reality.

There you have it. Flash storage is symbiotic with in-memory technology. You consume less space with flsh and the differences in velocity makes hard drives seem antiquated. As Moatemed says, it’s time to put that old hard drive in that dusty old bin with all that other old hardware that once seemed to so represent the next generation of technology.