| | December 20168CIOReviewReasons Why Flash Should Be Front and Center in Your Storage StrategyBy Vish Mulchand, Senior Director of Product Management and Marketing, HPE StorageThe rapid rise of flash to the top of the storage agenda is not surprising; given the advances we've seen in this technology over the past few years. Performance has improved by leaps and bounds, and the price decline curve has been steep. Density has been climbing steadily, with 3.84 TB Solid-State Drives (SSDs) now available. CIOs who haven't investigated flash for a while may be surprised at just how far the market has come, and how substantial the benefits of moving to solid-state media can be. Enterprise-class flash is now a reality, and it addresses some of the most pressing challenges that IT leaders face.Flash storage helps organizations achieve the following positive business outcomes:· Deliver service levels to the business predictably, reliably, on time and under budget. As data loads continue to expand, IT's ability to meet its service level agreements with the business is under increasing strain. Enterprise-class flash can be a key part of any business transformation. It can greatly improve the user experience. If you're looking to become more agile and to turn out products faster and cheaper, one way to do it is through analytics applied to massive amounts of data. Flash provides the ability to do that, making data more available so that you can make better decisions quicker.· Achieve CapEx and OpEx savings. It's possible to achieve up to a 75 percent reduction in the capacity you need for your application workloads, and a 50 percent reduction in IT staff workloads. Flash can reduce not only overall storage spend but also server and software licensing costs, as well as power and cooling, while reducing storage footprint. · Increase productivity. The operational efficiencies that flash provides can help free up IT staffers to take on up to four times as many projects as they're currently tackling, and twice as many projects for DevOps staff. In these days of fixed or shrinking budgets, when lack of expertise and resources is often more of a bottleneck than infrastructure limitation, flash can make a huge difference in IT's ability to get things done.Flash storage is making significant headway in the enterprise, and companies are starting to move their most performance-hungry workloads to all-flash arrays. These organizations like the performance and cost benefits, and they want to do more with the technology. At the same time, many businesses that could be capitalizing on flash storage are holding off, perhaps thinking that the technology is not quite ready for enterprise prime-time. If yours is among those, let me point out three features of today's enterprise flash storage systems that may convince you to take another look: 1. Flash-first architecture can deliver the performance headroom your workloads need ­ and then some. However impressive the specs on any flash drive may be, the performance of the array itself is just as important. If a controller was designed for traditional storage, it can easily become a bottleneck when applied to SSDs. Fortunately, today's flash-optimized platforms leverage the inherent strengths of the media to provide consistent, predictable performance levels that can handle the most demanding mission-critical workloads.In fact, flash storage provides so much performance headroom that it often opens up opportunities that were not envisaged in the original business case. For example, an organization that's looking to reduce latency for business transaction processing might find that, in addition, a flash system significantly reduces backup times. Or it may find that, because staffs need to spend 50 percent less time tuning up a database, they're freed up for more value- Vish MulchandIN MY OPINION
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