The use cases for object storage continue to expand. Organizations generate and capture expanding amounts of data and deploy new applications that process that data to generate new business value. To meet these new demands, object storage solutions must deliver both economical capacity and high performance.
Over the last five years, what mid-sized enterprises expect from their technology infrastructures has changed significantly. Data and the continuous availability of the systems that provide that data are critical to virtually all business operations. Beyond operations, we have entered a period of digital transformation where data has become a tactical and even strategic resource. Data is the foundation for value creation. Enterprise storage systems are changing in a variety of ways to address enterprise expectations for continuous availability, greater capacity, and the performance required to support critical workloads.
Every year at the Flash Memory Summit held in Santa Clara, CA, attendees get a firsthand look at the technologies that will impact the next generation of storage. This year many of the innovations centered on forthcoming interconnects that will better deliver on the performance that flash offers today. Here are DCIG’s main takeaways from this year’s event.
Storage vendors hype NVMe for good reason. It enables all-flash arrays (AFAs) to fully deliver on flash’s performance characteristics. Already NVMe serves as an interconnect between AFA controllers and their back end solid state drives (SSDs) to help these AFAs unlock more of the performance that flash offers. However, the real performance benefits that NVMe can deliver will be unlocked as a result of four key trends set to converge in the 2019/2020 time period. Combined, these will open the doors for many more companies to experience the full breadth of performance benefits that NVMe provides for a much wider swath of applications running in their environment.
Almost any article published today related to enterprise data storage will talk about the benefits of flash memory. However, while many organizations now use flash in their enterprise, most are only now starting to use it at a scale where they use it to host more than a handful of their applications. As organizations look to deploy flash more broadly in their enterprises, here are six best practices to keep in mind as they do so.
The exhibit halls at the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas always contain eye-popping displays highlighting recent technological advances as well as what is coming down the path in the world of media and entertainment. But behind NAB’s glitz and glamour lurks a hard, cold reality; every word recorded, every picture taken, and every scene filmed must be stored somewhere, usually multiple times, and available at a moment’s notice. It is these halls at the NAB show that DCIG visited where it identified two start-ups with storage technologies poised to disrupt business as usual.
Non-volatile Memory Express (NVMe) has captured the fancy of the enterprise storage world. Implementing NVMe on all-flash arrays or hyper-converged infrastructure appliances carries with it the promise that companies can leverage these solutions to achieve sub-millisecond response times, drive millions of IOPS, and deliver real-time application analytics and transaction processing. But differences persist between what NVMe promises for these solutions and what it can deliver. Here is a practical look at NVMe delivers on these solutions in early 2018.
Simplicity is one of those terms that I love to hate. On one hand, people generally want the products that they buy to be “simple” to deploy and manage so they can “set them and forget them.” The problem that emerges when doing product evaluations, especially when evaluating all-flash arrays(AFAs), is determining what features contribute to making AFAs simple to deploy and manage. The good news is that over the last few years five key features have emerged that organizations can use to measure the simplicity of an AFA to select the right one for their environment.
Today organizations more so than ever are looking to move to software-defined data centers. Whether they adopt software-defined storage, networking, computing, servers, security, or all of them as part of this initiative, they are starting to conclude that a software-defined world trumps the existing hardware defined one. While I agree with this philosophy in principle, organizations need to carefully dip their toe into the software-defined waters and not dive head-first.
In early November DCIG finalized its research into all-flash arrays and, in the coming weeks and months, will be announcing its rankings in its various Buyer’s Guide Editions as well as in its new All-flash Array Product Ranking Bulletins. It as DCIG prepares to release its all-flash array rankings that we also find ourselves remarking just how quickly interest in HDD-based arrays has declined just this year alone. While we are not ready to declare HDDs dead by any stretch, finding any sparks that represent interest or innovation in hard disk drives (HDDs) is getting increasingly difficult.
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