Just how flash is your enterprise storage rig?

Waiting for a flash replacement?

I'm surprised 10 percent are waiting for a flash replacement. We are at least 3 years away.

lol i have 30 2tb hard drives rigged on my home server , ssds are a nice idea but way too expensive for the kind of storage i need.

Shame about that last question

Because it is not presented in objective phraseology.

"What is holding you back from integrating flash into your enterprise storage infrastructure?"

Therefore, by the question's phrasing, if you have not integrated flash you are 'holding [yourself] back'. The phrasing shows a bias, a bias that you should be in flash and if not you are 'holding back'...something. A better, more neutral phrasing of the question would be:

"What is your reasoning regarding your current level of flash integration?"

Not perfect, but much better than it stands now.

I've done a fair number of SANs this year where the VM storage and bulk file storage are stored on spinning disks, but all the databases have been moved to flash. Moving to flash for DBs has decreased the cost of the installs, fewer servers are needed to serve the same load.

We're starting to dip a toe in the flash pool...

...we just started this month with an order for some flash for one of our Compellent arrays. Plan is to pin our Oracle RAC redo logs to flash (using a RAID10 r/w, RAID5 replay storage profile) and monitor the performance.

We are also looking to do a greenfield datacenter next year and this will be a good proving ground for flash. I was very specific when I submitted the business case for SSD by stating it is a consumable device with a finite lifespan, but the SLC drives we bought into have a crazy lifespan as far as our daily change rate is concerned. I also made very certain to not promise the sky to my Oracle DBAs but rather said it "should help some".

Yeah, I'd love an all-flash Compellent or 3PAR or VNX2 or something but there is no way I could ever afford something like that with my budget. Smart money in my case is on reducing latency in the fabrics and providing a fast SSD tier for incoming writes to land on, lots of tier 2 spindles to support read I/O, and lots of tier 3 capacity for my cold data to sit on and age gracefully. That way I can float all our apps and scale out performance and capacity in both compute and storage independently.

Hybrid mid-range storage for me. Above 3 are strong choices. NetApp FAS with Flash Pool and Nimble Storage CS stuff is also attractive for our size.

Beware Presumptive Marketing of Bigger Data Loss

They really asked some dumb leading questions there, didn't they? A lesson in how not to do presumptive marketing of a bleeding edge technology by a person who has no idea what marketing is or how it works in a knowledgeable technical B2B 'ish market place.

We use RAID hard drives for backup and tape for archive supporting many Terabytes per day of high value content created in multiple clients, managed by Archiware Software suite, BTW. It works well and is the best price/performance cost option, secure and reliable when called upon.

Flash is far too unreliable/volatile/corruptible as any stick user know - and expensive. OK for temporary memory that is also kept somewhere else but nowhere near backup or archive grade you can rely on. Why change what is reliable, secure and mostly recoverable if things go wrong for something that isn't ANY of these things, and was ever designed to be. You Flash if you want to........... if you feel l that lucky. Well, do you?

Been using flash... sort of.

We've had flash cache cards on our netapp filers pretty much since we bought it- we migrated those over to the new filer heads as well last year. Performance is pretty decent, considering we are running massive amounts of NFS and CIFS traffic in and out of it.

Now, at the branch offices, we are using hybrid arrays (SSD and spinning rust) via Nimble arrays- they seem to work quite alright, considering we are barely exercising them at present. With luck, that'll change when the test lab gets built and we can really push hard on the one being purchased for it.

Anon to protect the thing called a paycheck, obviously.