Roughly 6-7 years ago (around 2012), flash storage became affordable as a performance tier. At least, for the companies I was visiting. It was the typical “flash tier” story: buy 1-2% of flash capacity to speed everything up. All-flash storage systems were still far away into the future for them. They existed, and they were incredibly fast, but they also drove the €/GB price too far up, out of their reach.
However, in the background you could already hear the drums: it is going to be an all-flash future! Not just for performance, but also for capacity/archive storage. In fact, one of those people beating that drum was my colleague Rob. I recall vividly our “not yet!”-discussions…
And it makes sense. Solid-state drives are:
- More reliable: there are no moving parts in SSDs, and media failures are easier to correct with software/design.
- Power consumption is very low at rest: there is no little motor to keep platters spinning 24/7.
- Faster: the number of heads and the rotational speed of the platters limit a hard drive’s performance. Not so with flash!
They are still quite expensive, looking at €/TB. Fortunately, cost is coming down too. The last year or two, all flash arrays have taken flight in general-purpose workloads. Personally, I have not installed a traditional tiered SAN storage system in over a year anymore. Hyper-converged infrastructure: same story, all flash. The development of newer, cheaper types of QLC flash only helps close the gap in €/GB between HDD and SSD. But there is still a 20x gap. And one company we met at Storage Field Day 18 has a pretty solid plan to bridge that gap: VAST Data.
A few weeks ago I received a 1TB Western Digital Black SN750 M.2 SSD, boasting an impressive 3470 MB/s read speed on the packaging. I already had a SATA SSD installed in my gaming/photo editing PC. Nevertheless, those specs got me to pick up a screwdriver and install the new M.2 SSD. The physical installation is dead simple: remove graphics card, install M.2 SSD, reinstall graphics card. I wasn’t really looking forward to a full reinstallation of Windows 10 though. There’s just too many applications, settings and licenses on that system that I didn’t want to recreate or re-enter. Instead, I wanted to clone Windows 10 from SATA SSD to M.2 SSD.
Dr. J. Metz talked with us about NVMe at Storage Field Day 16 in Boston. NVMe is rapidly becoming one of the new hypes in the storage infrastructure market. A few years ago, everything was cloud. Vendors now go out of their way to mention their array contains NVMe storage, or is at the very least ready for it. So should you care? And if so, why?
The Dell EMC High-End Systems Division talked about two systems. First about the