The move from disk to flash is one of the biggest disruptions to ever hit the storage landscape—and it’s a trend that will continue to have big ramifications for computing architectures and application deployment for some time to come.
That’s the assessment of Kevin DeNuccio (News - Alert), president and CEO of Violin Memory, who noted that while flash adoption was initially driven by performance improvements and the growth of virtualization, it’s moving into a new phase.
“Flash has gone through a couple of distinct stages,” he said in a recent video interview. “Initially it was about improving performance and solving the disk bottleneck in storage, and it didn’t matter how much it cost. Then, the next phase was driving efficiencies, so de-duplication and compression technologies became important. Now, the trend is to collapse multiple tiers into the flash tier, to handle all primary and secondary workloads.”
He added, “A single platform allows businesses to get under the CapEx, but it also impacts OpEx because you no longer have multiple tiers, you’re not moving workloads around, and you don’t have different windows. That can give large enterprises a 10X app performance increase, and a 75 percent reduction in cost.”
DeNuccio said that because of this, being able to integrate into the stacks that enable new architectures is a primary focus for Violin, and the industry at large.
“I think, generally, integrated systems are a growing trend, whether you talk about hyper-converged in the virtualization space or what we’ve tried to do with the flash storage platform of integrating high-level data services … along with the architecture to manage flash,” DeNuccio said. “The more you can integrate for the customer and simplify it [the better], as the growth is so explosive with Big Data today and the Internet of Things still on the horizon.”
He noted that these changes—particularly the ability to do Big Data processing quickly and efficiently—are having profound effects on operations and application deployment.
“The use cases that we’re discovering are new,” he said. “For instance, inventory is the heartbeat of the retailer. With flash, we can go from taking a week to analyze inventory data, to one day—so they can make faster decisions about product pricing. This changes the competitive dynamics off how you run your business, along with the cost dynamics and better total cost of ownership.
Taken together, it’s clear that the storage industry is in the midst of sweeping changes.
“I liken it to when mainframes went to mini-computers, mini-computers to PCs,” said DeNuccio. “It tends to be so disruptive that it destroys the legacy leaders of an industry, and a new set of leaders have to grow up to take the new space, because the switch of a $30 or $40 billion industry that quickly just disrupts the way you think about things and the way you think about leaders.”
He added, “I think that’s what happening in the disk-to-flash movement, along with other disruptions of cloud and virtualization at the same time. It’s created an opportunity for IT professionals to really make a difference in how they make their decisions.”
Edited by Rory J. Thompson