As the price of flash continues to come down, I am often asked by IT professionals what the role for hybrid arrays will be since all-flash arrays are beginning to reach price parity with high performance disk based systems. As we discuss in the below video with Tegile’s VP of Marketing, Rob Commins, hybrid systems not only have a role to play in the all-flash data center, they may end up being the preferred deployment model.
Hybrid storage systems are most often associated with arrays that mix a tier of flash storage with a tier of HDD storage. They then provide intelligence to automatically move that data between storage tiers based on access patterns. But this intelligence is not dependent on the specific storage type, just that there is a faster and slower tier of storage to migrated data between. Today, the most common tier types are flash SSD and HDD. In the future, these tiers could be varying forms of memory based storage with no hard disk based storage. Or the hybrid system could migrate between flash storage and a cloud storage repository.
As we discuss in the video, Tegile, for example, today can migrate from very fast but low capacity flash storage to not quite as fast, but much higher capacity flash storage. In the future that fast tier could be one of the non-volatile DRAM technologies that are just now coming to market. The slow tier could be triple level cell (TLC) flash, which would drive the flash system price down but still deliver very acceptable read performance.
StorageSwiss Take
Both the present and the future could be very bright for hybrid based storage systems. The ability to leverage a hard disk based tier today makes flash technology more approachable for a wider set of data centers. The ability to mix different forms of memory based storage in the future will allow them to keep pace with customer expectations.
This Video is Sponsored by Tegile
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