Originally, hybrid flash arrays solved a price problem. Hybrid Flash 2.0 solves a performance problem. In their first iteration, these systems were designed to bridge the gap between expensive flash storage and more affordable hard disk drive storage. But as…
Flash storage is evolving on three vectors. Performance continues to be the key vector. Most data centers buy flash because of its performance attributes; high IOPS and low latency. The second vector is density. Flash has the ability to provide…
All-Flash Arrays, once thought of as the storage system for certain high performance use cases, are now the mainstream primary storage system. The best proof point of all-flash dominance comes from vendors that sell hard disk, hybrid (flash and hard…
The storage media used to be the slowest component within the storage architecture. Now, thanks to flash, it is the fastest. While the performance and low latency of flash allows data centers to make significant steps forward in application scale…
The next generation of solid state drives (SSD) are coming to market. Some are focused on performance and are leveraging NVMe connectivity to reduce latency. Others are focused on extremely high capacity (50TBs+) and are designed for dense data center…
NVMe is a new protocol that most data centers will use within the next several years in addition to SCSI. The path to NVMe will not require an infrastructure overhaul. Instead it will be a gradual, almost seamless process. And…
VMware changed the data center so much that it is hard to imagine a world without virtualization. One challenge for VMware customers (still) – as well as customers of other hypervisors – is storage technology hasn’t always kept pace with…
It is no longer “good enough” to have flash in the server. Where it is in the server is also of vital importance. Moving flash from the SAS interface to the PCI interface to the memory bus has significantly lowered…
The bottleneck in flash storage is often the interface. SAS/SATA interfaces were designed specifically for hard disk drives not for flash media. For example, flash storage can support many more simultaneous I/O operations. The resolution to the problem is to…
As we discussed in a recent entry “The Flash Performance Euphoria is OVER” the next generation of flash solutions will be compared to the performance of the first generation of flash solutions not hard disk drives. Users have learned that…
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