For decades, traditional storage (or disk storage) worked well for IT teams, giving them the high capacity they needed
But, as data storage space becomes more important every year, capacity alone is no longer enough. IT teams often face high latency issues and drive failures with traditional storage solutions – as seen by the high number of articles available offering advice for overcoming and anticipating such failures.
Businesses today need IT to ensure high performance for their applications and easy access to important data, which is why flash is in demand and disrupting the industry status quo. In 2016, IDC noted that the flash-based storage market was on the rise, and vendors have been actively building up their integrated, hybrid, and all-flash system portfolios over the past year.
One foreseeable outcome of this portfolio growth is a coupling of highly efficient technologies in order to achieve the highest possible levels of efficiency. As a result, it’s not surprising to discover some hyperconverged platforms are being integrated with flash storage. Hyperconverged infrastructure and flash storage have been developed side by side for years to accomplish the same goals without intersecting. Now industry experts expect that the combination of these technologies in one platform will soon become a preferred approach for on-premises IT.
Much like flash storage, advanced hyperconverged architectures address many modern business problems. The most sophisticated infrastructures are designed to improve performance, scalability, and data availability while reducing input/output operations (IOPS) that once made traditional storage challenging. In these instances, hyperconverged infrastructure and flash storage enhance each other’s capabilities, making them well suited for a combined solution.
Hyperconverged systems such as HPE SimpliVity can take flash technology to the next level by simplifying management, increasing durability, and reducing floor space. Customers who once considered built-in deduplication and compression nice-to-have “checklist items,” have come to rely on these features to not only increase performance, but also to alleviate capacity constraints within each unit. This built-in deduplication and compression, combined with reduced floor space, delivers higher performance, gives IT teams less to manage, and ensures high data availability and resiliency. Built-in data protection, low maintenance interfaces, and all-flash platforms have evolved similarly from wish-list features to requirements in today’s fast-paced business environments.
While flash adoption is on the rise, traditional storage is not obsolete. Despite the industry anticipation that disk storage will disappear, this technology is still the logical choice for deployments where capacity is the priority over performance. Like tape backup devices, disk storage will likely not disappear any time soon. But the trend is clear: The need for durable, high performance, flash-based solutions is on the rise. Hyperconverged systems that incorporate flash technology are designed to meet ever-growing and changing business needs. Simple, powerful, and efficient technology is the way forward for integrated datacenter solutions.
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. Learn more about the all-flash hyperconverged infrastructure in this ESG Technical whitepaper. 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
