Of all IT components, the network has been among the slowest to virtualize, but with new launches from companies like Brocade Technologies, Inc., the day is here. The convergence of software-defined, cloud and flash are liberating infrastructure from its old clunky confines. We’re approaching the era of the fully virtual data center — nay, the all-flash virtual data center.

Hu Yoshida, VP and CTO at Hitachi Data Systems Corp., spoke about the difference between the oft touted all-flash array and an actual all-flash data center. He said of the arrays, “VCs are going crazy about those things, putting a lot of money into them. But those all-flash arrays are really appliances. If you want an all-flash data center, you still have to worry about all the enterprise things around availability, replication, disaster recovery” and more.

“So if you’re talking about an all-flash data center,” he told Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team. “It’s more than just an all-flash array. You’ve got to expand that requirement to include all the enterprise requirements we’ve traditionally had.” He said he believes that storage networking company Brocade is getting a step closer with its Gen 6 Fibre Channel.

The promise of Gen 6

Yoshida said there is no longer anything holding all-flash storage back from a full takeover. According to him, some all-flash storage solutions can be had at a lower cost than traditional disk storage, so “the cost is not a factor anymore.”

He said that advances in networking will enable flash storage to perform like never before, and Hitachi’s partnering with Brocade on the X6 Director is the beginning. “Gen 6 is really going to open up a lot of bandwidth and IOPS [input/output operations per second] for us,” he said

He also spoke about the need for network solutions for data manipulation, especially in IoT applications. “You need to bring together that Oracle or SAP data with the sensor data that comes in and integrate that together,” he stated, adding that open-source allows disparate data sets to be blended for this purpose.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s live event coverage.

Photo by SiliconANGLE