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.
It is a fact of IT life: hardware becomes faster and more powerful with every new generation on the market. That absolutely applies to CPUs. A few weeks ago at Intel’s Data Centric Innovation Day in San Francisco, Intel presented their new Intel Xeon scalable processors. These beasts now scale up to 56 cores per socket, with up to 8 sockets per system/motherboard. This incredible amount of compute power enables applications to “do things”, whether it’s analytics, machine learning, or running cloud applications.
Storage Field Day 18 will be a full event, according to Stephen Foskett. And Stephen doesn’t use italics too often! Three days, likely 3-4 sessions a day, each two hours long. Add a jetlag, a foreign language and new technology, which all need inline processing to keep up to speed. Outside of the sessions: very interesting conversations (tech and non-tech) while we drive between companies, so no naps. In other words: our brains will be melting for three days at Storage Field Day 18. And I’m VERY much looking forward to it!
Back at Storage Field Day 16 in Boston, Zerto presented their VM replication software. It’s a block level, continuous hypervisor based replication, using a journal to log I/O in a VCR-like fashion. This enables you to rewind to any point in time that’s covered in the journal, and recover your VMs to that exact state. Zerto’s plans are a bit grander than “just VM Replication” though… they aim to cover the complete IT Resiliency market.