If you’ve researched your options online about Flash storage and how it can benefit your organization, you will read that Flash is offering better performance, lower energy consumption and greater resilience in comparison to traditional hard disk drives.

Flash technology has become omnipresent in the consumer market – phones, tablets, PCs, digital cameras, etc. As the technology matures, most vendors are now putting the technology to work in the data centre. Flash is found in everything from servers and networking gear to storage arrays today. It has become more commonplace to find flash as a key technology in enterprise storage systems.

According to a recent report, more than 90 percent of the performance issues affecting applications these days can be traced back to storage. IT departments are looking for higher TCO while driving down costs. The smart ones now realize there is extra processing speed hidden in their existing storage and can implement storage flash technology in certain areas of their data centre to improve competitiveness.

To build a sustainable advantage in a world of 24x7 continuous operations, today’s organizations must be able to extract the full value of their large and complex data sets. Because data is the new business currency, organizations must quickly and efficiently transact, analyze and gain actionable insight from it to fully capitalize on its value. To do so, data driven applications must operate at high availability and peak performance. Flash technology in a storage environment delivers extreme performance to derive measurable economic value across the data architecture – servers, software, applications and storage.

 What is important to know is that flash storage has very different characteristics than hard disk drives (HDDs). Flash storage has no spinning disks, which changes the way the reads/writes are done from/to a flash media, remarkably improving IOPS, response times and power consumption.

Flash might be a little more expensive than disk if you are only considering the cost per GB of the hardware acquisition, but if you factor in the cost of datacenter floor space, power and cooling then the cost of getting the same performance out of spinning disk is more than 10X the cost of flash. The cost of capacity is also quite a bit less with flash when you consider space, power and cooling requirements but not quite as exponential as the performance equation.

Getting the most from flash requires using it strategically to maximize the technology’s effectiveness and cost efficiencies. Not all applications require an all-flash solution; but many do, and they are often those most critical to your business.

Download this infographic to see some performance data in Flash Storage applications.
View this video for an in depth review of IBM Flash Storage and its many benefits in today’s data centre:

Interested in finding out more on flash, software-defined storage and other hot 2014 storage trends?

To investigate how these technologies can help your organization and be integrated in your data centre, please contact me to schedule a whiteboard session at 1-866-610-8489 or send me an email.

Paul Oh, Vice President of Technical Services
Sentia