FLASH is appearing in many ways: in all-flash storage arrays, in servers, and in integrated systems with converged infrastructure and switches that direct data traffic throughout the cloud. Importantly, flash is now being supported by enterprise software solutions that flow, end-to-end, across many computing tiers – web-serving, application-serving and database-serving.
The convergence of these trends makes one thing clear: we have entered the age of the flash-transformed data centre, where every tier of the data center is seeing rapid adoption of flash technology.
But what has driven this infrastructure change and how do the benefits that flash confers enable businesses to compete at the speed they need to in today’s evolving marketplaces?
The catalysts propelling this data centre transformation are the IT mega trends: cloud computing, big data analytics, social media and mobility. This new wave of computing requirements presents challenges to IT organisations, as they multiply the demands on these outfits to support traditional as well as new workloads.
And this is where flash can help. Flash storage boosts performance for many of these data heavy trends —whether it’s read-intensive, write-intensive, or mixed-use workloads.
As such flash brings with it an array of business and IT benefits: faster performance, better security and more environmentally friendly output. In short, flash is enabling quicker processing – and faster time-to-results, allowing all sorts of businesses and industries to compete in a more agile and secure way.
Take the role of flash in Big Data analysis. Flash storage supports real-time data analytics, the kind used to analyse credit-card use, mobile phone call patterns, and retail transactions to detect criminal activity and prevent it while it can be stopped, and it does this through its optimization of fast and efficient data processing.
Flash is also key to providing positive customer experiences on e-commerce platforms. It speeds up user requests to shopping engines, reducing the response times for each order to purchase goods and services.
With regards to data warehousing, flash storage adds capacity to caching, as data is staged from remote storage to the central processors for updates. It also benefits high performance computing (HPC). HPC, also known as technical computing, typically applies parallel processing to demanding scientific or engineering and data-intensive workloads. Examples include: seismic analysis, oil and gas exploration, weather forecasting and simulations of market behaviour. The more data-intensive the workload, the more it will benefit from the use of flash storage, allowing each server in an HPC cluster to work more effectively.
The surge in the consumption of media and entertainment via mobile and tablets is also supported by flash, which enables the efficient and smooth processing of large amounts of data so that images and audio will flow smoothly when presented in a final display to end-users. It also supports the editing process, improving the productivity of those who edit video, audio and media files.
Flash also enables better security for businesses by increasing the speed at which data is analysed. In today’s information age, threats to business assets are often digital and the many applications and monitoring systems that exist to combat these threats all have one thing in common: the amount of data they have to analyse grows daily while the window they have to respond is shrinking. Flash keeps the CPUs of security and compliance database fed with data to deliver reduced analysis times and faster automated response times.
Flash is being leveraged in more applications and databases and the performance gains for data-intensive and mission-critical workloads are deepening adoption in many organisations as it benefits all the major categories of enterprise and cloud solutions.
As such, IT organisations can no longer afford to ignore the evolution towards an all-flash data center. Flash is now affecting every type of data center workload and application. Flash-based storage systems not only accelerate performance, they also bring IT flexibility and business agility into the overall IT equation—a must for CIOs who are continually challenged to maintain budgets, while increasing business agility and lowering total cost of ownership.
1. The Flash-Transformed Data Center: Flash Adoption Is Growing Across the Enterprise - June 2014 -http://www.sandisk.com/assets/docs/the-flash-transformed-data-center-whitepaper.pdf
