In our recent webinar, “Flash Storage – Deciding Between High Performance and EXTREME Performance”, Storage Switzerland and Violin Systems discussed the use cases that demand extreme performance over high performance. Extreme performance is for applications that can benefit from consistent low latency and access to one million plus IOPS. Extreme performance is almost always tied to applications that directly impact an organization’s revenue but most IT planners also assume that the systems are more expensive. In reality, once the true total cost of ownership is factored in, these systems can save the organization money in addition to generating more revenue.
Business Advantage
Thanks to decreased transaction times and workload runtimes, extreme performance systems provide the organization with a significant business advantage. These systems provide faster time to answers, enable more frequent iterations of test models and increase customer satisfaction by eliminating wait times.
Cost Reduction
Extreme performance systems also provide an often unexpected hard cost savings versus the existing storage infrastructure. These systems enable a significant reduction in the application infrastructure. A higher performing system which delivers that performance consistently means the organization can get more out of every CPU within the application stack. What used to take multiple high core count servers can now be done on one or two, lower core count servers. Fewer, lower core count servers are significantly less expensive than the alternative.
The reduction in servers and CPU cores also means that the organization needs to pay for fewer application licenses. Software licensing for some of the applications in this space, like Oracle and MS-SQL, can be more expensive than the hardware. Lowering license counts can go a long way to paying for the extreme performance investment.
That reduction in servers also leads to lower network infrastructure cost. Fewer servers means fewer network interface cards, fewer switch ports consumed and less cable infrastructure to be implemented.
Finally, fewer servers also leads to a reduction in overall infrastructure complexity. Complexity can be the most costly part of the advanced application budget. Complexity means more IT administration time is allocated to managing the infrastructure. Complexity also leads to mistakes which lead to application outages. A complex environment is also harder to troubleshoot, meaning that problem resolution takes longer. Additionally, the costs of prolonged outages of mission critical workloads are many times more than the expense of the initial investment in the extreme performance storage system.
To learn more about extreme performance storage systems and when to select them over high performance systems watch our on demand webinar “Flash Storage – Deciding Between High Performance and EXTREME Performance”, In this webinar we detail the high-performance and extreme performance systems, the use cases they address, how to decide which workloads should go on which system type and how IT planners should integrate them.
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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