Flash in the enterprise

Flash storage has recently celebrated its 25th birthday, a major milestone considering the generally short shelf life of products in the hi-tech industry. Unfortunately, despite its performance superiority, Flash has been operating in the shadows of traditional hard disk technology for a long time. This is primarily due to reliability and cost factors. However, in recent years, new Flash technologies have developed in many forms and have achieved high reliability and extreme performance at consistent low latency. This makes the technology a perfect fit for customers where processing delays constrain the business. Areas where time to market and timely customer services are likely to be key competitive differentiators, and where consistent response times and performance is crucial, Flash is now receiving the attention it deserves.

Gartner, for example, estimates that the all flash storage market is going to approach £2.6 billion by 2015 and IDC believes that organisations will be moving the most frequently accessed application data that requires speed, power and performance onto Flash storage, while lower priority applications will be kept on the cheaper HDD alternatives. For example, an organisation with the requirement for processing high priority online customer transactions may decide to deploy the customer facing database on Flash technology, while workloads and data that do not require such extreme performance may be placed on a lower cost high capacity Hard Disk.

Key considerations for Flash adoption
The key question for organisations requiring extreme performance today are therefore how and where to adopt Flash technologies in the data centre to gain the most benefits. It is clear that given the significant cost differential between Flash and Hard Disk technology, consideration needs to be given to the goals of the organisation and the types of workloads that would benefit from Flash. One of the big advantages of Flash technology is that it can replace 1000s of hard disk drives while providing extreme performance and low latency, and with a much lower space and energy footprint. For example, Flash SSD drives consume about a third of the electricity of a similar Hard Disk Drive. However, Flash is not a one size fits all technology and implementation of Flash should be highly strategic and targeted.

Flash workloads and high-priority environments
While each organisation will have its own priority areas, Flash is usefully deployed in virtual desktop environments, for example, where many Desktop images may need to be stood up quickly or need to share physical resources. Another area where Flash can offer substantial benefits is for databases that are mission critical to the operation of the business and are essential for efficient and reliable servicing of customer queries and orders. Today, a flash array can deliver many hundreds of thousands of input/output operations per second (IOPS) with submillisecond latency and are suited for customers looking for transactional database-driven applications where responsiveness is critical.

Combining Flash and Hard Disks - a successful hybrid approach
An organisation that has implemented Flash storage to great advantage is global cosmetics brand Revlon. Revlon transformed its IT infrastructure from ground up, including creating a private cloud, building a global disaster recovery site and virtualising all resources. As part of the change programme, the company was able to lower storage costs by mixing solid-state disks and relatively inexpensive SATA drives within a single aggregate, or “hybrid aggregate”. Adding SSDs to the aggregate increased the performance of the busy SATA disks by a factor of ten. The use of software that combines the capabilities of server-based flash technology with intelligent caching to extend the virtual storage tier to the enterprise servers has also allowed Revlon to use relatively inexpensive SATA disks by minimising latency by up to 50 per cent. The company is now able to perform 14,000 transactions per second, has increased storage capacity five times at the same cost and decreased data centre power consumption by 72 per cent, with flash technology having playing an important part.

Data Protection for Flash technology is still important
While Flash offers extraordinary levels of performance along with efficiency, energy and space benefits, it is no different from hard disk technology in the way it should be treated from a data protection perspective. Reliability was one of the key factors in preparing the technology for enterprise use as Flash wears out as it is used. Flash products are therefore designed for a specific lifespan. Features that manage and control wear, such as wear levelling, are therefore key to the health and reliability of the Flash storage. Enterprise class Flash products which provide concise media reporting functionality and safeguards through mature integrated data protection functions such as RAID, SnapShot, Cloning and Replication are key differentiators driving system confidence and credibility. These remain the winners in today’s Enterprise Flash storage market.

In Summary
On the whole, the guiding principle should be to leverage Flash to gain the best possible improvement in performance and reduction in latency for specific workloads. Flash is not a one-size-fits-all solution and it is important not to lose sight of the need to maintain a healthy and balanced long-term view of the organisation’s storage requirements. Investing in cheap consumer grade Flash to boost performance may offer attractive benefits on paper, but this approach is highly likely to lead to higher operational costs and data protection issues as time goes by. The likelihood is that organisations will be moving key customer facing, business critical workloads to Flash. It therefore makes sense to take a strategic approach that considers all elements, including security, data protection, availability, management, control and scale to unlock the full value of Flash Technology.