Is the all-flash data centre just a tantalising dream?

B2D

Depending on your environment, it is quite possible that in the region of half of your storage requirements are for backups. If you are backing up to disk, then the cost for flash is likely to be pretty high when compared to a disk based solution. Space savings are minimal if you are looking at high density disk arrays, and in many cases the flash equivalent will actually need more physical space.

Welcome to 3 years ago

Been running all the front and back end servers for my organization on Intel SSD's for a couple of years now. Couldn't be happier with the power consumption, speed and reliability improvements.

I would suggest any organization looking at doing it this way, has a good handle on what data they are actually storing and for how long. Its amazing the efficiencies that can be done when you are actually restricted to storage space.

"Startups such as Pure Storage and SolidFire have arrays designed from the ground up"

Putting SSDs in a box and running Linux with some custom software doesn't count as designing something from the group up.

Dedupe CPU

Just wanted to remind folks that dedupe is a very CPU intensive task. So when you have 24 x 2TB or 4TB drives in a shelf, getting the advertised 300 - 600TB of actual data on there will be really tough.

I know some vendors have struggled with this, but not sure of the state of dedup'ing large pools across the board.

Let's get to the point of having all our DBs on flash first

Before worrying about an all-flash datacenter. The idea of deduplication making flash cost less is stupid, because you can dedupe to disk and realize the same savings. That's how the backup to disk products like DataDomain function.

The utility of backing up to flash is near zero, as drive performance is not a limiter and power consumption benefits would be minimal since the drives are idled when not in use. Flash will have to be get cheaper for that to make sense, and we are a long way away from that.

Chris,

I have read quite a few of your articles full of some very good points, which are often followed by your usual lot of illogical unwarranted OPINIONS. Quite predictable at this point. Can you change it up a bit please?

Let me politely educate you.

1. HDD replaced tape, and it was never because HDD was cheaper than tape. It was for many other reasons, the most fundamental being that running tape was costing businesses money by being slow and not scalable.

2. Flash does not have to be cheaper than disk to replace it therefore. Can you please re-read point 1 to understand the lesson? Hey, anyone else out there, do you want to help Chris out here?

3. If you rent a cage at a co-lo running a bunch of Hitachi HDD for 3 years in California and find yourself going over your power consumption, and having to pay overages, even though you only really occupy about a fourth of each rack in the cage, doesn't it make sense that for the next 3 years you might want to only rent 1/2 of a rack with way lower power consuming all-flash equipment, and save yourself a significant amount of money?

4. There are all-flash array companies out there that have already proven this again and again hundreds of times with hundreds of companies. But since Chris Mellor does not operate in the real world, we have to read your ridiculous unwarranted conclusions about how the all-flash data center is a pipedream still, even though the all-flash array market doubled to well over $1bil last year. The market keeps growing like that because the economics are so gray????

5. The all-flash data center was only a pip dream until all-flash companies came out with all of the Data Management functionality that all of the BS vendors have. It was a feature set void keeping these vendors from this reality, not the CAPEX argument you are trying to make here. Now that companies like Violin have launched these data management features, there is nothing stopping companies from going all-flash, and they are actively pursuing it.

Chris, come on mate. Come off of it already.

WAKE UP.