Consumer volume economics and enterprise data value benefits will drive solid-state (flash) drive dominance in the enterprise storage market for the foreseeable future, writes Wikibon CTO David Floyer.

Today, flash storage is still more expensive per bit than traditional hard (magnetic) disk drives. However, the order-of-magnitude performance and huge input/output advantages of flash — which enable IT to replace multiple physical copies of large data subsets for development, QA and other uses with logical copies running off a single database master copy — make flash less expensive for many production uses.

By 2020, a variety of technology developments, largely in software, will give companies running on flash-based server-SAN systems business advantages that those still on strictly hard-disk-based approaches may never recover from.

Today, Floyer writes, several problems prevent enterprises from reaching the full value of flash storage. One is data center architecture. Just replacing existing HDD arrays with SSDs on a storage area network imposes a performance tax on storage access created by the distance between the arrays and the servers. Server-SAN, in which SSD arrays are attached directly to the servers (or built into them in hyper-converged systems) provides higher performance.

Another issue is that the middleware and applications in use today were designed for the slower response times and limited if input/output of HDDs. Taking full advantage of SSDs requires complete redesign. That is happening but will take until 2019 for the benefits, to be fully available, Floyer projects

It then will take an additional two years for enterprises to fully convert to these new systems. This takes time, effort and money. However, the business advantages that this will provide will give early adopters a huge lead over their competitors, one that they are likely to maintain for the foreseeable future.

As a result, Floyer says enterprises need to be on board with SSD Server-SAN for active processing by 2019 at the latest, in order to remain competitive.

The full Professional Alert looks at all the forces impacting the server market in detail and provides a full argument for Floyer’s conclusions. Wikibon Premium members can read it here. To learn about subscribing, look here.

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