Stuart Miniman34
At #vmworld the storage discussion is flash-centric, what is the balance of flash/capacity today and going forward?
John Furrier
the balance is about latency, throughput, and cost per gig and knowing the workload
Chris M Evans
I think at least 25% of the show showed flash related products
Chris M Evans
We had flash as a feature (caching), we had flash as a product (SolidFire etc). Then of course we've all flash versions of of hyperconverged.
Rob Peglar
it will be variable. enough flash to enable latency-sensitive apps, enough capacity to enable the biz competitive advantage
Stuart Miniman
@chrismevans it's at least 50% of the buzz, along with hyperconverged and SDS. Flash is important, but has it gone too far?
Jérôme Lecat
according to IDC 1.8% of Storage Systems capacity is flash.
Chris M Evans
It's a feature!! Until the next greatest thing comes along.
Chris M Evans
Jerome, that's a fair point - lots of hype/noise around flash; not necessarily the area with the most sales.
Rob Peglar
there is also the biz choices between ephemeral store and persistent store. this is a biz decision that tech will (always) evolve and enable the choice
Andrew Reichman
flash accelerates perf, but is expensive- most data sits idle and doesn't need it- accelerating with the smallest amount of flash, or shrinking footprint w/ all flash remains a challenge
Jérôme Lecat
Scaity deployments typically have 1% of capacity in flash, for a 10x increase of performance
Jérôme Lecat
@reichmanIT indeed expensive, the 1.8% of capacity is 20% of the cost, again according IDC
Rob Peglar
CIOs must stop thinking cost/TB and start thinking investment/biz outcome. Data and its analysis enable biz outcomes to be optimal
Andrew Reichman
@jlecat as with any expensive accelerating technology, the key is analytics that allows you to use it where it wld add the biggest benefit and archive the rest
Rob Peglar
ratio will vary wildly depending on vertical and use cases. Difficult to generalize.
Rob Peglar
@lleung 100 PB is small in some cases. I have had several 1EB conversations over the past 12-18 months
Andrew Reichman
for my $$, the analytics described by datagravity has more transformative potential than noise around flash, SDS & hyperconverged, but is a harder problem as indexengines & Kazeon showed
Rob Peglar
@lleung it's the Double Olympic phenomenon. Every 8 years the capacity of a single system rises 1,000x.
Rob Peglar
@lleung in 2000 the industry was designing 1TB systems. In 2008, 1 PB. In 2016 it will be 1EB
Rob Peglar
Not true. _Some_ storage - depends on architecture - suffers from OP/UU. Others do not. Not having to pre-allocate has been around for decades, not a new idea.
Storage Godfather (HPEStorageGuy)
With dedupe ratios, efficiency, etc, cost of flash is at less than 15K drives (at least with HP 3PAR it is). Hearing customers switching from HDD to SDD because of this.
Chris M Evans
@HPStorageGuy Then we will have tiered flash within the same array and start the cycle again.
Storage Godfather (HPEStorageGuy)
Do you mean we'll tier flash using different ($/GB) flash drives? I can see that coming.
Chris M Evans
@HPStorageGuy I think we will; it's a natural extension of where we went with disk.
Rob Peglar
@chrismevans @HPStorageGuy agree. If there are different $/metric levels of any technology, we will find a way to tier it
Chris M Evans
@peglarr If things weren't dictated by price/cost, we'd all drive to work in Ferraris... :-)
Jérôme Lecat
@chrismevans A Tesla for me :-)
