Can all-flash arrays, spinning disks and hybrid really live together? Conventional wisdom says that for performance-sensitive applications, you want all-flash arrays (AFAs), while for less-critical applications and bulk storage, disk is better. How can you use them in conjunction with each other? What would a joint AFA/hybrid/disk environment look like? Broadly speaking, there are two types of …
This is a huge load of stupid.
"Every byte of flash storage that you buy from a hybrid vendor is more expensive than the same amount in an all-flash array, he argued.".
Based on what evidence? Just dropped there like there was an IDC report with that as the title. So only companies that don't sell spinning rust can discount SSDs?
"Customers might want to use all-flash arrays as the primary system, and then send snapshots from that system to a hybrid one. In the real world, that’s not really possible, he says. It would take a lot of technical work to make it happen."
That's just weirdly wrong. Does that person quoted actually have experience with SAN arrays? You can do that in the NetApp array he dismisses earlier in the story quite easily. I know lot of clients who do. It's not a special feature. EMC can replicate from flash to spinning even if you have to use RecoverPoint. It took 10 seconds to Google how to replicate from XtremIO to Vmax or VNX.
Just terribly stupid writing.
Too often lately the conversations in storage are around the media and that seems to be driving much of the conversation. The reality is, there wasn't much to this article regarding business outcomes, reliability and IT savings, specifically around data management. These are the things that are top of mind by CIOs, not "what media are we running on?"
When Moshe Yanai decided to build INFINIDAT (a flash-optimized solution) (or as IDC would call it a "flash-lead" solution) he did something that flew in the face of conventional storage wisdom of today. He said "forget the media" lets develop a system that can take advantage of whatever the fastest media is today or becomes in the future. Today 85+% of the IOs served by InfiniBox come from DRAM which is 100x faster than flash. Already you have a hybrid system that is faster than flash. He also said, lets also focus on the reliability and low cost (as well as performance) that CIOs are looking to achieve in order to make their businesses more competitive.
All flash systems are still too expensive, at scale to deploy throughout, even with data reduction technologies. It is simply impractical for your entire data center to be all flash. What happens next is you end up with silos of data, as was stated in the piece. This becomes a management nightmare. Data profiles are evolving and even more difficult to manage today so how does one know when data can be migrated off AFA then back when needed for a big data analytic operation?
The equation for an AFA solution just doesn't solve. They may offer performance but that is all. To meet the reliability requirements, you need more flash and solutions like replication making management hard and driving up costs. How does this help the business?
If you start to look at important use cases that drive business forward, such as big data / analytics, a system that can support ingesting information and running analytics very fast while at the same time, take the data that is less used and automatically put it on spinning disk such that when you want to run a query that requires this information, you have instant access to it and that data can be a part of your analysis, without ever having to manage it. That is innovation and competitive advantage.
If you want to solve the business outcome equation, start using smart math that solves challenging storage problems and delivers simplicity.
(Note: INFINIDAT employee)
True - people hear "hybrid" and they think SSD+HDD. But step back a moment, and think "hybrid" = fast tier + slow tier. This makes room for the notion of a tier of let's say NVMe SSD in front of cheap and deep SSD. Recently, our industry friend, Enrico Signoretti, posted a blog on Juku.it titled "Your next all-flash array will be a hybrid" - he nailed it. Those systems that are designed for multiple tiers of media can make any data management headaches (and redundant costs) between the tiers "go away".
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