FINAL WORD
ALL DATA CENTRES
ASPIRE TO BE CLOUD-
LIKE – TO MELD
TOGETHER COMMODITY
HARDWARE WITH
SOFTWARE AND
AUTOMATION THAT
DELIVERS AGILITY,
ELASTICITY, RESILIENCY,
SECURITY AND MOST
OF ALL, SIMPLICITY (BY
SHEDDING DECADES
OF ACCUMULATED
COMPLEXITY IN STORAGE
AND NETWORKING)
O
ver the past 25 years, mobile
phones have been completely
rethought, thanks to Moore’s
Law and the advent of the world-
wide web, touchscreens, and so on.
Same was the case with everything
in the data centre, with servers and
networks getting roughly 1000X faster
(thanks again, Dr. Moore) and seismic
shifts like virtualisation and network
switching
But then there’s storage. Most
enterprise storage solutions in use
today were designed 20+ years ago.
Storage has been stagnant because
of mechanical disk. Hard drives do not
follow Moore’s Law – yes, they have
gotten denser, but not faster. As a
result, there has been little impetus to
innovate. Until now.
Disruption #1: Flash memory
Over the past decade, flash memory
has redefined the consumer technology
experience. It is the storage inside
your smart phone and is used heavily
in modern data centres like those of
Google, Apple and Facebook. Flash is
not only much faster, but also more
reliable, denser and power efficient. It
is only a matter of time before flash
will supplant hard drives for all hot and
warm data. Paraphrasing Jim Gray: as a
result of Moore’s Law, flash is disk and
disk is tape.
Of course, flash has been used
for years as a cache or tier to
accelerate disk storage. However, the
performance disparity between flash
and disk is so great that hybrids of
flash and disk perform like disk as the
“long” disk operations dominate. To
use an analogy, the difference is like
that between travelling internationally
by jet or ship, and it is pretty hard to
plan a business trip if you and your
colleagues don’t know which one each
will get. (Perhaps this is one of the
reasons why next-gen hybrid solutions
have thus far not done as well as
hoped in the enterprise?)
The reason of course that flash was
originally limited to a cache/tier was
that it was expensive. Back in 2011,
the price of consumer-grade multi-level
cell (cMLC) flash was about four times
higher than the price of a fast hard
drive (15K rpm). Today, cMLC costs
less than fast disk, the same fast disk
that underpins the $24B performance-
optimised (a.k.a. “Tier 1”) storage and
related software market. Given its
advantages in nearly every dimension,
it is no wonder that flash has rendered
performance hard drives obsolete.
Disruption #2: The cloud
Cloud is a more nebulous concept
than all-flash (pun intended), but it is
having a similarly disruptive impact
on the storage industry. Amazon Web
Services (AWS) has simply reset the
bar for IT by making it dramatically
easier for developers to deploy and
scale applications. As a result, all data
CHRISTIAN PUTZ
Director, Emerging Markets,
Europe, Middle East & Africa
at Pure Storage
88
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