The real benefits of All Flash Arrays

Written by PSTG | Sep 5, 2016 2:05:00 PM

In a recent webinar IDC's Eric Burgener predicted that by 2019 All Flash Arrays will be driving between 60% to 70% of all the storage spend on primary storage - taking over from legacy designs. 80% of their respondents in a recent report were committing to flash arrays in their data centres.

IDC believe enterprises have historically hesitated in their decision to purchase - 'cost' is the reason why people are not buying all flash arrays. Eric suggests "this is the wrong way to look at things.

Even two years ago flash array total cost of ownership was significantly better than you would get from hard disk drive systems" Eric added "if you look at the secondary benefits there's not even a comparison on TCO!"

So let's take a look at the facts that IDC present about the secondary benefits AFA (the first being Data Reduction – see below):

You buy a much smaller number of drives. IDC have seen that typically an Enterprise needs 50-80% fewer devices to meet the same performance
Floor space and energy consumption is about half of that needed if you have a spinning disk on per device basis. IDC are seeing huge savings over a 3 to 4 year ownership calculation from the floor space requirements, the power and cooling required.
Because Flash latencies are lower vs spinning disk you get much better CBU utilization out of the servers. So you need a lot fewer servers to get the same level of performance - somewhere between 5-30% fewer servers. Not only saving money by buying fewer servers but also on software savings.

The real benefit of this technology is with Data Reduction

The latencies with flash allow you to actually run capabilities like compression and duplication in line against primary applications and still deliver sub-millisecond performance consistently to that application. This has allowed you to use these types of technologies on all flash systems for performance intensive workloads where as you could never have used these kind of things if you had hard disk drive based systems because the latencies just weren't there. And why is data reduction important? Because it has a significant impact on what the effective dollar per GB cost of flash capacity is.

Flash costs continue to plummet over time. This means that application workloads that can utlilise this will only increase. IDC believe that it will not only dominate the primary applications but because of the cost per GB, will start to encroach on the secondary applications.

Pure Storage were named as leader two years in a row in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid State Arrays

"More enterprises want to consider an all-flash array when it comes time to replace their aging legacy storage solutions," said Eric Burgener, research director Storage, IDC.

As a complete storage solution for mid-sized IT and an affordable entry point to flash for larger enterprises, the new addition to the FlashArray//m family from Pure Storage is the perfect start to your customers flash journey.

PURE STORAGE FLASH ARRAY//M10 IS HERE!

//m10 Highlights:

> Low entry price point, making those first all-flash steps easier
> Non-disruptive performance and capacity expansion
> Easy consolidation of additional workloads
> 5 - 10TB raw capacity and 12.5TB or 25TB of usable capacity after data reduction
> Up to 100,000 32K IOPS with less than 1ms average latency
> 99.999% availability
> 100% performance during maintenance and failures

Click for more information

Sources:
IDC MarketScape: Worldwide All-Flash Array 2015–2016 Vendor Assessment
Gartner
IDC MarketScape: Worldwide All-Flash Array 2015-2016 Vendor Assessment, by Eric Burgener, Ashish Nadkarni, and Eric Sheppard, Dec 2015, IDC Doc#US40721815.
Pure Storage and IDC Webinar

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