There is little debate that flash has an important role to play in the virtualized environment. Its high performance, low latency attributes make it ideal for data centers looking to solve the infamous storage I/O ‘blender’ that a dense virtual machine environment creates. As a result, IT planners have been inundated with various ways to implement flash into their virtual infrastructures. As we discuss in the video below all of these implementation methods have their place, but it’s important to know when to use each one.
Organizing Your Flash Options
The first step in selecting the right flash for your environment is to understand what your flash options are. In our ChalkTalk we break the market into four categories; server cache, shared hybrid systems, server-side SANs and shared all-flash arrays. Again, each of these options can improve performance over a disk-only environment, but each has its own challenges that IT planners need to be aware of so they can be worked around. At the same time each have some specific advantages as well.
The Pros and The Cons
While we have detailed each of these pros and cons in the video, two of the key issues are predictability of performance and price. The server caching, hybrid systems and even the server side SAN solutions, all count on hard disk as a capacity tier in order to drive down cost per GB. As long as data is being accessed from the flash cache area, then performance is acceptable. The problem is that a cache or tier miss can degrade performance significantly. And it will stay at those unacceptable levels until the caching/tiering algorithms can reevaluate access and get the right data back into the cache.
Shared all-flash arrays solve this unpredictable performance problem by eliminating the HDD cache/tier altogether – but do so at a price. To combat the apparent price disadvantage of an all flash storage system many add capabilities like thin provisioning, writable snapshots, deduplication and compression. The key for all-flash array vendors is to deliver all of these features while still maintaining the performance advantage that all-flash arrays provide.
Storage Switzerland is developing a complete workshop to help IT planners develop a flash storage strategy for 2015. This video gives you an excellent place to start. We will be premiering that workshop in Portland Oregon on October 15th.
This Video is Sponsored by Pure Storage
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