Why flash storage is impacting the business landscape
Today such technologies continue to expand our abilities. The humble USB port connects more devices together. Touch screens have opened the gates of easy interaction with devices. Sensors are making our vehicles and buildings intelligent. Yet one of the modern world’s biggest disruptors continues to go on unseen. Dell EMC says that if they were to nominate the technology MVP of the early 21st century, it would be flash memory and storage.
Flash is all around us. You will find it in your phone and most electronic devices around you. The SD card used in cameras and some phone models is flash memory. Your smartwatch tablet and computer use flash memory, as do those USB thumb drives that seem to be as ubiquitous as change under the sofa cushions. If you ever transitioned to a Solid State Drive (SDD) on your laptop, you have sampled a taste of flash’s transformative power.
“When someone asks me to explain flash memory, I pull out my smartphone,” says Rudi van Rensburg, senior manager for Primary Storage (All Flash) at Dell EMC. “You can run your life off your phone – that’s how powerful a device it is. Flash memory is a big part of what makes that phone so fast and compact all at the same time. That is not possible with spinning drives.”
Flash trumps spinning drives
Flash is fundamentally different from spinning drives aka. hard drives. The latter operates like a high-speed vinyl record, moving a robotic arm across the spinning platter of the drive to locate data. There are physical limitations to how fast this can be done. Hard drive platters are also very sensitive and can be easily damaged. Often a small amount of damage can cascade over time to corrupt the entire drive. Due to the random nature of such damage predicting imminent failure of a hard drive is challenging and rarely accurate.
Having no moving parts is one of flash storage’s big advantages. Instead of spreading data along a platter, the data on flash is written by arranging electrons along grids through tiny power currents. This not only renders much faster data reads and writes, but it is also easier to manipulate and rearrange that data. The result is magnitudes more speed, as well better predictable reliability. Whereas a spinning drive shouldn’t go beyond a five year lifespan, top grade enterprise flash storage has shown longevity of well over a decade.
Flash flexibility
Combine speed and reliability, and you have a lot of flexibility. The impacts of this on a business are manifold, says Van Rensburg:
“I’ll give you a real world example I see all the time. A client wants 100 terabytes of storage for their data. So they have that much in spinning disks, plus extra disks to address failure issues. These are arranged in tiers so they can get the best performance out of the fastest disks. This works, but it is expensive and takes up a lot of space.
"Now, let’s convert that into flash. First, they don’t need the full 100 terabytes, because flash is much, much faster and uses compression technologies not available on traditional spinning disk drives. We’ve seen customers’ performance benchmarks double, quadruple and even go as high as ten times. Second, they don’t need tiers, because you can pool flash as a resource, so you are doing far more with less. Third, the failure rate is much lower and also much easier to predict.”
The high speed and reliability of enterprise flash storage is perfect for modern Tier 1 applications such as ERP systems, says Dell EMC. As Van Rensburg points out, companies that adopt enterprise grade all-flash systems for their core applications are seeing performance jumps that leap off the chart. The larger boon of flash’s flexibility is that it can easily be allocated to other applications in the business.
“When flash started being adopted in enterprises, around 2008, you saw maybe five percent of company workloads being put on flash storage. Today we’re seeing 100 percent utilisation. In none of those cases did the companies feel forced to use flash. They started small, but saw such leaps in performance and reductions in cost of ownership that it just made sense.”
"There is still place in modern companies for spinning drives. But just as wooden wheels made way for vulcanised rubber, the way forward is the speed, agility and reliability of enterprise flash storage."
Listen to Rudi van Rensburg's podcast on the topic:
