Fifteen years ago, your standard hard drive had a capacity of about 36GBs
These hard drives delivered roughly 150 IOPS. Today, hard drives are equipped with over 6TB of capacity… and they deliver roughly 150 IOPS.
The data problem isn’t just one of capacity anymore. Data growth is an issue to be sure, with IDC predicting the world will create 163 zettabytes of data a year by 2025. But this isn’t the problem that should be at the forefront of IT professionals’ minds. The most troubling issue for those in IT is that increased data growth and hard drive capacity don’t necessarily correlate to improved performance. Read and write speeds have not increased at nearly the rate that disk capacity has, and this creates a performance bottleneck.
Think of it like drinking a milkshake through a straw: no matter how large your cup is, you can’t drink your beverage any faster if you don’t increase the width of your straw. And the throughput gets worse if you make the milkshake thicker… you’re not drinking it any quicker, and you’re only making yourself frustrated, tired, and inefficient.
It’s the same in the data center too. As infrastructure struggles to keep up with the increased volume of data necessary to make your business productive, performance hasn’t kept up with the increased capacity available. However, there is a cure – the key to solving the data problem is in making data truly efficient.
Data efficiency technologies were originally designed to help manage rapidly growing volumes of data. However, now that the primary concern for IT isn’t addressing capacity limitations, but performance ones, data efficiency technologies like deduplication, compression, and optimization need to be adjusted to make sense in this new environment.
Herein lies the most prominent data center conundrum: how do you ensure peak performance and predictability of applications in a cost-effective manner in the post-virtualization world when IOPS requirements have increased dramatically and hard drive IOPS have increased only incrementally?
Many companies look to flash storage as a solution to combat stagnant performance rates. But, while flash storage is useful for removing the performance bottleneck, it’s expensive and not suitable for all portions of the data lifecycle.
One solution is hyperconverged infrastructure. Hyperconverged solutions that leverage flash/SSD technology are designed to make data efficient and increase data center performance. HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged technology delivers deduplication, compression, and optimization for all data globally, across all tiers of the data lifecycle. And it’s all inline, making the data much more efficient to store, move, track, and protect.
As the amount of data increases every second of every day, businesses have to find a way to make sure their infrastructure can handle the increased load – without sacrificing performance. By making data efficient from the very outset and across all lifecycles, HPE SimpliVity solves the data problem.
About Jesse St. Laurent
Jesse St. Laurent is the Chief Technologist for HPE Hyperconverged and SimpliVity. He uses his 20 years of experience to engage channel partners, evaluate emerging technologies, and shape innovative technology solutions involving data center modernization. For more information on how hyperconverged infrastructure can elevate your hybrid IT environment, download the free HPE SimpliVity edition of Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Dummies ebook.
To read more articles from Jesse St. Laurent, check out the HPE Converged Data Center Infrastructure blog.
