Commodity storage has its place, but an all-flash architecture thrills

An IT industry analyst article published by SearchSolidStateStorage.

Some IT folks are trying to leverage commodity servers and disks with software-implemented storage services. But others want an all-flash architecture.

Every day we hear of budget-savvy IT folks attempting to leverage commodity servers and disks by layering on software-implemented storage services. But at the same time, and at some of the same datacenters, highly optimized flash-fueled acceleration technologies are racing in with competitive performance and compelling price comparisons. Architecting IT infrastructure to balance cost vs. capability has never been easy, but the potential differences and tradeoffs in these storage approaches are approaching extremes. It’s easy to wonder: Is storage going commodity or custom?

One of the drivers for these trends has been with us since the beginning of computing: Moore’s famous law is still delivering ever-increasing CPU power. Today, we see the current glut of CPU muscle being recovered and applied to power up increasingly virtualized and software-implemented capabilities. Last year, for example, the venerable EMC VNX line touted a multi-year effort toward making its controllers operate “multi-core,” which is to say they’re now able to take advantage of plentiful CPU power with new software-based features. This trend also shows up in the current vendor race to roll out deduplication. Even if software-based dedupe requires significant processing, cheap extra compute is enabling wider adoption.

In cloud and object storage, economics trump absolute performance with capacity-oriented and software-implemented architectures popping up everywhere. Still, competitive latency matters for many workloads. When performance is one of the top requirements, optimized solutions that leverage specialized firmware and hardware have an engineered advantage.

For maximum performance, storage architects are shifting rapidly toward enterprise-featured solid-state solutions. Among vendors, the race is on to build and offer the best all-flash solution…

…(read the complete as-published article there)