30 June 2014
Enterprise customers are faced with an unprecedented diversity of choice when selecting the storage components and infrastructure for their datacenters and cloud environments. With an intelligent combination of flash storage and spinning media, enterprise data can be positioned and migrated so that its business value is optimized throughout the data life cycle.
The exponential growth of data is well established and most companies have developed strategies to manage growth rates that average 35% or more per year. Hard drive vendors have achieved an impressive record in boosting density but I/O capability of hard drives has not advanced to the same degree. A performance gap has opened up, amplified by advances in multicore servers. Today, the ability to scale storage I/O capability while holding large quantities of cold data in a cost-effective and resilient manner is a fundamental requirement.
Increasingly, flash storage is penetrating every facet of computing, from client devices to the datacenter. The advantages of flash performance are well recognized, but the cost of flash prevents it from dominating storage. As such, flash is an effective complement to other storage technologies, especially HDD storage. This is epitomized in PCs that use dual-drive systems (SSD module plus conventional HDD), and in datacenters that combine a flash layer with HDD storage.
