The Storage Food Chain: Mission Critical Workloads will Move to All-Flash, Hybrid
Flash has been a revolutionizing technology impacting enterprise and consumer storage alike. From the data center to the USB port, flash storage has introduced new capabilities for storing and sharing data. And this week’s been particularly huge for flash technology, given the number of related updates and product launches from some of the industry’s best. Wikibon’s CTO David Floyer wrote up a piece on the latest news from one of these top players, EMC, exploring its news of an all flash array and a line of PCIe cards that can fit inside a server. He deems the launch a significant milestone for the industry at large, and outlines where the market is headed.
Floyer writes that EMC’s entry into this space “legitimized the flash-only storage array market.” The company’s competitors – IBM, Dell, NetApp and Hitachi – are all or will soon be offering a pure-flash array of their own, but none of them possess EMC’s market share.
“There are a lot of flash-only vendors out there, [but] what this brings is the EMC label, the EMC sales force and EMC quality control. It doesn’t yet have things like replication on it…so there will be areas where the stable VMAX product from EMC will still be required, but over time that will be flushed out,” Floyer said.
Floyer forecasts that in 2013 and beyond, most mission critical workloads will be moved to flash arrays and hybrid systems. He believes that over the course of the next two to three years most frequently accessed data will be stored on SSDs, while disk-based solutions will take on the role of “capacity data farms” that house cold data.
Floyer adds that the greatest threat to all-flash arrays is the PCIe card, the same sort that EMC announced alongside its new system. The reason is that SSDs that sit closer to the CPU offer much lower latency than an external array. Another advantage of server-side flash is IO consistency, which means that IT departments don’t have to worry about latency spikes that may affect the experience – and productivity – of the end user.
Hear more from Floyer on EMC and Fusion-io’s latest moves in the flash game in the video below, from an earlier episode of the NewsDesk show with Kristin Feledy:
A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:
Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities.
- 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more
- 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni — Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network.
About SiliconANGLE Media
SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI.
Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.
