Published on the 27/08/2015 | Written by Donovan Jackson
Faster enterprise storage means better business results
With the announcement of a new all-flash family of storage arrays which compete hard on price, HP said the all-flash data centre is increasingly becoming viable owing not only to the lower costs of the hardware, but also thanks to the improvements in application performance which fast disk can deliver.
HP’s 3PAR StoreServ Storage now includes a new 8000 family which the vendor says features the industry’s most affordable all-flash array, starting at AU$40 000.
One of the remarkable features of the technology industry is that prices tend to come down steeply as products and solutions mature. Nowhere is this more apparent than in storage, where the price per megabyte of ‘traditional’ disk drives, an integral component of enterprise storage arrays, has come down from around US$9200 in 1956, to around US$ 0.0000283 this year.
Since 2013, flash-based solid state drives have also seen the cost per megabyte come down, from US$0.000719, to 0.00034 this year. Be that as it may, flash disk is still considerably dearer than spinning disk drives.
Chatting with iStart , HP Storage GM Paul Shaw said the world is ‘in the middle of technology inflection which should see anyone from the SMB level to the highest levels of enterprise benefit from improved performance’. “There is a benefit to be gained from technology refreshes [thanks to advancements in performance and cost reduction]. Even those organisations with assets just two years old should be considering it, though the usual is a three or five year refresh.”
Flash, Shaw pointed out, delivers greater performance with fewer drives over arrays comprised of ‘spinning disk’. It might cost more, but since it makes applications go faster, it offers more value.
While speeds and feeds are routinely pooh-poohed as the domain of hard core techies, Shaw makes the point that performance matters to everyone these days. Having to wait for anything – be it a line of business application or even a social media page to load – tends to mean drifting off and doing something else. “With all-flash data centres, you’re looking at real world performance gains of 60 to 90 percent,” said Shaw.
In what he calls ‘the ideas economy’, he added that the performance of IT systems, whether supporting traditional or new applications, means faster time to market and the ability to achieve more. “It’s not just an IT benefit, it is a business benefit. Speeds and feeds matter, from your personal device all the way to line of business applications. Any lag becomes an issue, and all-flash is key to delivering better experiences whether for internal staff members or external customers.”
In a statement, HP said the flash storage market is growing at above a 46 percent compound annual growth rate and noted that Gartner has identified HP as a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Solid State Arrays.
