Flash: Enabling the “Mission-Critical Business”

Imagine how your business might benefit if you processed 1,000 more transactions per second. If you concluded an analysis 20 minutes sooner. If a batch processing job was reduced from eight hours to two – or even less.

Those are some of the benefits offered by flash storage for business applications and data, as opposed to traditional mechanical, hard disk-drive storage devices. It’s a fundamental business transition from selecting some applications to push towards peak performance into an enterprise where every application accelerates to its maximum potential. Flash enables a high performance “mission critical business,” which efficiently manages data center resources while leveraging personnel more effectively.

The traditional approach of using mechanical storage for enterprise applications and data forced a trade-off in business efficiency. Companies had to pick several key applications to put their resources behind, to try to lift to their greatest possible performance. The tradeoff was they had to accept lower performance from other applications because of the technological limitations of how their applications and information was stored.

Rapid growth in the flash market
According to Morgan Stanley, the percentage of flash storage in data centers will increase from 5.1 percent to 8.5 percent in 2013. Industry analysts IDC predict that flash storage revenue will increase from $3.0B in 2013 to $5.6B in 2016. At the same time, performance hard disk revenue will decrease from $16.3B in 2013 to just $8.6B in 2016.

Why this shift in the storage landscape? There are inherent benefits to flash storage. It has no mechanical parts. It typically consumes 20% of the power of mechanical devices, and it can write and read information an order of magnitude faster than traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). Because flash has the ability to write and read significantly faster than HDDs, the technology dramatically improves the performance of applications.
Flash uses less power and generates less heat than HDDs. That means reduced cooling costs in data centers, and a smaller footprint overall in the number of devices a company owns.

Companies also find a management benefit from using flash technology. Applications are tuned less frequently, so companies spend less time managing performance and more time delivering new business features while reaping the benefits of optimal application performance.

In the mechanical world, to make things work faster means buying more assets – more HDDs, more cost, more complicated management. With flash technology, businesses can continually scale, adding as many applications as they need to a common platform.

Advice for switching
When making the switch to flash technology, there are a few things to consider.

First, it’s important to look at your business in the context of time. The benefits we addressed earlier – more transaction processing power, reduced time in executing large-scale enterprise calculations – are possible. Yet many vendors are still selling the technology, not working to address business goals.

Ask yourself whether your potential vendor is actually helping optimize your business workloads. This requires a consultative approach, looking first at your organization’s most critical business applications, and creating a strategy to later scale the use of the technology for all your business needs.
The technology has to be delivered simply, so that it is easier to deploy and put to work, adding new features quickly and efficiently. It must be set up as a platform rather than a collection of isolated boxes. If you end up managing many independent flash devices instead of a scalable platform, you'll inherit similar problems encountered when managing multiple mechanical devices. Be sure that any product that claims to scale, can grow capacity and increase performance. Sometimes you need to store more data and other times you need the data stored to execute faster. The right product will adjust to the demands of your business.

Companies typically turn to flash storage because business needs outpace the abilities of mechanical technology. Buying another drive or caching solution or another array will no longer give their application the lift required to satisfy the demand for information. What they realize immediately is their business performs better with flash. It enables a company to make better use of its data and applications, and saves time otherwise spent having to optimize application performance.

Flash is about much more than storage. It's about workloads, performance, maximum business potential, and moving from managing the mission-critical application to operating the mission-critical business.