Wikibon has been urging CIOs to re-architect their data centers around all-flash arrays for several months. Wikibon Co-founder and CTO David Floyer, in particular, has published several pieces of analysis demonstrating the compelling value of moving to an all-flash architecture, with primary flash storage moved physically as close to the servers as possible to minimize latency.

To further emphasize the need to make implementing an all-flash migration strategy a top priority, he now provides a bulleted list of the “Top 10 Reasons why CIOs Should Migrate to All-flash Datacenters by 2016”.

Flash has a reputation for being more expensive than spinning disk, but that is no longer true. Eight of the 10 points Floyer makes, based on his research, address controlling expense to make flash significantly less expensive than spinning disk. These range from technological changes such as implementing data de-duplication to changes in operational procedures such as taking advantage of the much higher I/O bandwidth of flash to decrease the number of database copies IT needs to support for everything analysis and decision support to application development and testing.

While these methods, if implemented consistently as part of a comprehensive strategy, can significantly reduce the costs of IT operations, Floyer argues that the real reason for moving to all-flash is to support new kinds of applications and real-time and forward-looking business analysis that can provide significant competitive advantage to the enterprise. Flash is a key element in creating data-driven companies, in which all decisions are made based on data analysis rather than guesswork, and people at all levels are empowered to make better decisions. This is absolutely necessary to improve responsiveness to markets and identify new business opportunities in time to capitalize on them, Floyer asserts.

An all-flash array infrastructure will support access to thousands of times more data than is available to anybody in today’s organization, blending internal data, mobile data, aggregated cloud data and data from Internet-of-Things. It will support new, disruptive business processes using new applications unencumbered by the constraints of yesterday’s systems, the most crippling of which was the slow and inconsistent response time of spinning disk arrays.

Floyer’s full analysis is available behind the pay wall on the Wikibon Premium site along with other compelling analysis from the Wikibon team.

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