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organisations evaluating flash storage, the
primary considerations are:
•
•
•
•
•
Performance
Capacity and scalability
Resiliency and availability
Support for future needs
Total cost of ownership
Each of these topics is covered in the
sections that follow. As you consider these
purchase criteria, it will be helpful to evaluate
the strengths and limitations of your current
storage solution. This can help you focus on
the criteria that are most important based
on your organisation’s needs.
All-flash performance
Most all-flash storage systems on the market
utilise solid-state drives (SSDs) available from
a number of different vendors (although
a few vendors persist in building storage
systems using custom NAND Flash modules
rather than commercial SSDs). SSDs deliver
superior performance versus hard disk drives
(HDDs) in terms of the three most common
storage performance metrics:
• I/O Operations per Second (IOPS)
• Throughput, usually measured in MB/sec
• Latency, usually measured in milliseconds
or microseconds Different applications
generate different I/O workloads
When you consider all-flash storage
options, it’s important to think about
the I/O characteristics of the workload or
workloads you need to support.
All-flash storage systems that offer quality
of service (QoS) controls can provide
significant advantages in situations where
you are consolidating multiple applications
on a single storage system, preventing any
one application from consuming too many
resources and allowing you to prioritise the
most important applications. n
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