Flash storage offers a number of compelling advantages over traditional disk. As Wikibon detailed in a February research alert, solid-state drives not only outperform their mechanical counterparts but require less power and space as well. And since they don’t have any moving parts, SSDs also generate less heat, which translates into a longer lifespan.

Yet despite the overwhelming functional benefits, enterprise adoption of flash continues to lag behind that of disk due the simple fact that it’s more expensive.  That, however, is changing with the rise of hybrid arrays from the likes of Tegile, which claims to have achieved a middle ground between the affordability of HDDs and the raw horsepower of solid-state memory by marrying the two technologies together in a single chassis. The company recently released a handy infographic that lists the use cases best poised to take advantage of that combination alongside those workloads which are better served by pricier all-flash solutions.

Hybrid arrays are the more cost-effective option when it comes to capacity-intensive applications that have traditionally relied on hard drives for data storage, but where they really shine are more performance-oriented environments that require more IOPS than a disk system can provide, Tegile’s chart highlights. These include virtualized server and desktop implementations as well as some large-scale enterprise apps where latency can be an issue. But that is only true to a degree.

Applications that can’t tolerate delays exceeding a few milliseconds generally run more efficiently atop all-flash arrays. Falling into that category are real-time analytics and online transaction processing (or OLTP) systems that execute a particularly large number of  input and output operations per second.  In such use cases, Tegile says that price-performance ratio of a pure-SSD system will be greatly superior to that of a hybrid appliance.

photo credit: ViaMoi via photopin cc