| | December 20138CIOReviewFlash Changes Everything Some ThingsNetApp, Inc. [NASDAQ: NTAP], formerly Network Appliance, Inc., is a computer storage and data management company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California with a market cap of $13.85 billion.By Dale Wickizer, CTO, NetAppDale WickizerGovernment agencies almost by definition are at the forefront of the big data challenges facing all large enterprises. How to access large amounts of data, make sense of it and act on it in a timely manner in dynamic environments is as much as an issue for intelligence agencies, homeland security, first responders, and health care agencies as it is for the financial services industry and Amazon.com. In the middle of the big data debate is whether solid state flash technologies live up to their hype as the answer to every big data problem. In fact, some have said, "Flash changes everything." What government CIOs and their teams need to realize is that flash--in the right circumstances--is indeed a game changer. However, it is not always the most cost-effective technology for all workloads. Let's look at some examples where flash does shine:In hybrid storage arrays (which include both traditional spinning disks and some amount of flash storage), flash has already proven its value, particularly in server virtualization and desktop virtualization environments helping with small block, random reads and to some extent, random writes. The most effective hybrid array vendors have figured out how to incorporate flash into their ecosystems, without forcing you to manage another tier of storage. Lately, however, we are witnessing the emergence of dedicated flash vendors, whose appliances are being used to handle the more demanding enterprise workloads.The most mission critical enterprise application workflows depend heavily on high transaction rate, low latency online transaction processing databases. These applications and databases are also dominated by small block (8 Kbyte or 16 Kbyte) random input/output, generally mostly reads vs. writes. In the past, database administrators had to go to great lengths to keep these databases working properly. It was common practice to run these databases in raw partitions (without a file system); they would have to pay close attention to the RAID (redundant array of independent discs) configurations used, often giving up storage efficiency for performance; they would reorganize databases on regular basis to remove "chaining" (which is disruptive); and the more desperate would resort to short-stroking disks, forcing them to pay for far more disk capacity than they wanted, just to get enough disk spindles to provide the performance they needed. In this type of environment flash can be transformational. It is now possible to get an all-flash appliance that holds several Terabytes of capacity and which delivers almost 400,000 input/output per second. Think about it: This small opinionin my
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