Service providers are adopting all-flash arrays (AFAs) within their data centers to take advantage of advances in the storage industry; and they’re no longer focusing on just managed or unmanaged infrastructure and OS, but instead are using AFAs to move “up the stack” and cater to specific applications and workloads on their cloud and hosting platforms.
The goal? To enable features like rich APIs and advanced automation, point-and-click management, scale-out, shared-nothing architecture and performance quality of service (QoS), by leveraging solid-state innovation.
According to a benchmark report from SolidFire, service providers are interested in Web hosting/Web content management (76 percent) and databases (73 percent) as the top two applications. Consequently, the ability to manage performance at the application level becomes a more critical factor in platform design and delivery.
The report also found that flash storage is helping service providers save on administrative costs. The majority of survey respondents say they expect to save 40 percent or more on overall administrative time for tasks such as performance troubleshooting, capacity planning/design and upgrades via AFAs.
“We all know the IT industry is going through a massive change spurred by cloud,” said Darnell Fatigati, senior product and segment marketing manager at SolidFire, in a blog. “Analysts project six times more growth in cloud than in traditional IT by 2018 (IDC (News - Alert)), representing a window of opportunity for service providers that can bring new cloud services to market quickly and outperform competitors in the areas of cloud platform availability, performance, security, value and simplicity.”
Storage, a critically important part of any cloud platform, is working to deliver highly available, high performing, highly profitable storage services in multi-tenant environments using solid-state technologies to advance these trends even further.
“Forward-thinking service providers are placing a greater emphasis on innovation, building software-defined, automated, next-generation data centers that are cost-effective and achieve operational and architectural efficiencies in order to not only improve service delivery to customers, but to combat the perpetually rising prices of power, real estate, and labor at the same time,” Fatigati said.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson