Posts by boriss111

Why not AFA? Or better to say, why would you want to buy a hybrid array (I don't believe anybody buys disk-only arrays for traditional enterprise workloads anymore) instead of an AFA?

No matter how I look at it, it all comes down to price. If for particular workload, no matter what that may be, the AFA can be improve company's bottom line, then AFA it should be. The tricky thing is, of course, how to evaluate the impact of AFA on company's bottom line. For some people, it is the matter of TCO, for some people it is the improvement of revenue/efficiency.

This brings us to the begining, traditional enterprise workloads on AFA, why should I bother? You shouldn't. Just add one more column for AFA array in your comparison sheet when buying your next storage.

(disclosure: working for EMC partner company)

True role of AFA

Before we start debate if built-from-scratch AFA or evolved-enough-to-be AFA storage is better, we really need to consider which role we have in mind for the all flash storage array. As everything else in life, there is always a trade-off with storage systems. Built-from-scratch AFA shine with their killer performance (measured by latency) under heavy workloads (measured by IOPS). But this comes with price. We cannot expect too much services to be offered as these would, without doubt, destroy performance. Maybe a bit extreme example would be AFA with synchronous replication over 100km distance running on top. What would be the latency? This instantly disqualify built-from-scratch AFA storage as general purpose storage and more importantly, being only storage in the datacentre. Additionally, extreme performance of built-from-scratch AFA is seldom needed for all workloads in a typical environment.

On the other hand, evolved-enough-to-be AFA doesn't offer that much performance under heavy workloads, but come at much more attractive price point. Sharing majority of components with a general purpose storage which is being produced in huge quantities have something to do with that. Being born out of disk based storage also brings full array of storage services which allow evolved-enough-to-be AFA to be only storage in environments which require high performance across the board.

Having all this in mind, we should consider that role of built-from-scratch AFA and evolved-enough-to-be AFA is not the same, therefore comparison between two is not exactly apple to apple comparison.

(disclosure: working for EMC partner company)