Flash: A bright future in the storage world

By Surajit Sen

In many ways the humble storage array is the most critical piece in the IT infrastructure of any organization. Most people would agree, simply because storage systems house the most critical asset of any organization, its information. There is another reason however which is less obvious. Storage has also the single most important element in determining what performance you can extract from your IT Infrastructure, simply by being the slowest element in the computing change. Traditional storage systems are built on electro mechanical spinning disk media; the last bastion in the Datacenter which was until recently unconquered by Solid State Electronics.

One of my earliest memories is that of my father bringing home our first television set. It was a big boxy thing, which would take 5 minutes after we switched it on, for the picture to appear. The pictures were black & white and there was of course no remote. One day the pictures started appearing distorted, so my father opened the back of the TV; I was fascinated to see an array of bulbs (I later studied that they were diodes) which lit up when the TV was switched on.

In many ways the traditional storage systems remind me of that era. For some strange reason despite all the innovation on hardware, storage systems continue to be built on spinning disk media. It was therefore always constrained by the performance and reliability that the industry could squeeze out from a bunch of magnetic platters.

The old TV lasted us a number of years, but we eventually replaced it with a solid state TV. This one was a marked improvement on the earlier TV. The pictures came on as soon as the TV was switched on, the pictures were in color and we got our first taste of a remote.

A few years ago the storage industry realized that they couldn’t squeeze more performance out of the spinning disks, so they started experimenting with Flash based disk drives. The first attempts shoehorned some flash drives into a traditional storage system, which could accelerate specific workloads. This yielded some benefits but it quickly became apparent that this architecture had limited utility. With the flash drives the disks were no longer the bottleneck. It had now moved the bottleneck up to the controllers, and traditional storage systems being constrained by a two controller architecture could absorb only so much flash.

When I moved into my first apartment, I was thrilled on one hand, but also struggling to fit everything into the limited square footage that Mumbai real estate prices had allowed me. I wanted to buy a TV which would occupy less space. The LCD TV gave me exactly that. It would hang on the wall like a picture and display brilliant pictures. It occupied less space, consumed less power consumption and had better picture quality.

The storage industry next created the Hybrid arrays which used a lot more Flash and built in automatic tiering capabilities, which would ensure that the hot data was always served out form flash drives and the cold data (less frequently accessed data) would be served from traditional disks. This architecture overcame some of the limitations of the earlier approach, however the traditional architecture was still limiting the scalability of the systems, and it could realistically be used for only a handful of workloads, stymying any plans of workload consolidation.

My LCD TV lasted me a good five years but then the picture quality deteriorated, and I had to eventually replace it with an LCD TV. This was a much superior technology, much thinner, lesser power consumption, and a superior picture quality. Needless to say, we were thrilled with our new toy.
A bunch of new startups in the industry came up with the idea of All Flash Storage arrays. It seemed like a great idea, as it wouldn’t be saddled by any of the constraints that the spinning disks imposed on storage systems. It also had some exciting data management services, that the All Flash architecture could unleash. They were however all built on a scale up, dual controller architecture making it hard to scale for workload consolidation efforts. It saw a spurt of adoption amongst organizations which were looking to accelerate one or a handful of their workloads. The high cost of Flash drives however limited the adoption amongst IT organizations.

A few years ago we moved into a bigger apartment and were scouting for another TV. We found the new LED based 4K TVs fascinating. Not only were they thinner and consumed less power, they were versatile too. I could hook up my TV to the Wi-fi at home and play movies online. It made the DVD & Blueray players redundant, as it could play all movie formats directly from a USB drive. A host of other features like effortlessly toggling videos and images between the smartphone and TV, made this a very exciting appliance.

In its fourth generation now, the All flash storage systems offer a radical transformation over all past efforts. It’s built on a scale out architecture, which ensures that you always add more controllers as you scale capacity, striking a perfect balance between the performance of Flash drives and the power of the controllers. It came inbuilt with a suite of data management services like inline deduplication and compression, squeezing out every drop of real estate from the expensive Flash drives. Data reduction makes the TCO of All Flash arrays compelling, as a significant amount of data can be hosted on a very small Flash footprint. The power, cooling and Rackspace are dramatically reduced. As the controllers and capacity are scaled by adding building blocks called bricks, the data rebalances itself by spreading it evenly across all bricks, ensuring linear performance scaling. It offers unlimited space efficient copies, making it easier to build operations recovery. Space efficient copies also enable rapid application development by allowing multiple developers to work in parallel on their own data copies. The architecture also makes it possible to achieve true consolidation, as now development, production and analytics can all be consolidated on the same storage array, without worrying about one workload cannibalizing the performance of another.

All Flash arrays therefore are the tool which can enable the vision of an All flash Datacenter.

Today All Flash storage is a rage with enterprises, as they are fast discovering performance, energy savings, reduced costs and scalability as primary benefits accruing to them by deploying this technology. The increase in adoption of flash storage however, is not just for the exceptional performance it delivers, but also for how good economics excites IT organizations to adopt it quickly. The rapidly advancing technology is ensuring that while costs / GB of storage steadily plummet, speed and energy savings continue to rise. Flash storage technology is the solution of choice for enterprise storage architecture, especially in today’s “big data” push. It is staking its claim to the $65 billion computer storage market today.

According to IDC, the worldwide enterprise all-SSD storage spending in 2016 is expected to be around $ 1.6B. With a 5 year CAGR at almost 60% to date, IDC figures also state that the “primary influencer in the solid state storage array market is the declining solution price, from $11.12/GB in 2012 to a forecast 2016 price of $2.88/GB, a 2012–2016 CAGR of -28.7%.” Gartner expects that the all flash storage market will be worth $4 billion this year, and this points to one clear fact: Flash is the direction and fact of this decade.

According to same study done by IDC, the top reasons business leaders initiate digital transformation of business processes and business models are to enable a faster go to market, build deeper understanding of customers’ buying preferences and improve the quality and response time of post-sales services. To support these transformation priorities, demand for AFA solutions is set to increase significantly, with a 40 percent uplift in business adoption predicted over the next 12 months 72 percent of respondents deploying AFA by mid-2016 (a 40 percent annual increase). Optimal utilization of resources to drive cost down is one of the top 3 business imperatives that are being driven by digital transformation of business processes and business model in Indian organizations.

From all these insights from the industry and adoption trends, it is evident that we stand at the cusp of a big change in the storage industry, driven by the adoption of All Flash Arrays.

The author is  Country Manager – Speciality Business at EMC

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