More and more people are seeing the migration from conventional hybrid storage to all-flash storage environments, which offer high performance at a competitive cost and great innovations to the market.
Due to the exponential growth of data generation in the world, which reached 40 trillion gigabytes in 2020, several storage equipment manufacturers have sought different ways to increase the density of delivered data.
Improvements were made in the way data is recorded on magnetic disks, the famous HDs, in architecture or software. In the software, the improvement was based on two concepts:
- scale up : increment of more capacity (memory, disk, CPU etc) in the same equipment;
- scale out : more modern, it concerns the ability to use several different equipment, working and making resources available as if they were a single device.
Therefore, we can conclude that the data storage capacity has already been resolved. Storage equipment manufacturers have invested in competitively priced solutions that have enabled companies to store information in petabytes (PB).
In addition, there are even cloud service options with their virtually unlimited storage capacity. But, faced with so many possibilities, why invest in all flash storage? How to migrate to this type of storage?
What is all flash storage?
All flash storage is a large-scale data storage device based on flash memory only. This device has a high performance, providing quick recording and access to information, with real-time data analysis , and lower cost of electricity and cooling.
Large-scale storage solutions represent a solution to the ever-increasing demand from organizations to know their customers, their target audience, their behavioral characteristics, their needs and their problems.
Knowledge is power. We’ve all heard that phrase, which has been repeated since the dawn of civilization. Today, it is truer than ever! The best proof of this is the market value of the main technology companies, such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, whose main asset is the knowledge of people and their behavior.
The greater demand for knowledge from customers and consumers around the world has led to the creation of analytics tools, such as machine learning and deep learning , which consume a huge amount of data and seek intersections unreachable by pure human analysis.
But the analyzes made by them have a response time greater than necessary to maintain the competitive advantage of companies. Soon, the concern raised became the performance of storage devices.
Advantages of all flash storage
In the past, storage equipment used only mechanical disks, which were of higher density and, consequently, cheaper and of lower performance. Later, hybrid equipment was developed, which combined mechanical and magnetic disks (conventional HD technologies with SSD).
Today, the applied solution is All Flash Array (AFA) storage equipment or storages that use only magnetic disks. These devices deliver superior performance, both in the number of operations per second, the famous IOPS and Throughput, and, and above all, an extremely low response latency.
See more advantages of implementing flash local storage in your company:
- density optimization with better use of physical space;
- reduction of corporate costs with maintenance, energy consumption, cooling, space, etc.;
- better performance due to advanced algorithms that allow for heavy loads and infrastructure growth;
- simpler and faster operations that promote the automation of the definition of the IT infrastructure (provisioning) and the global protection of data;
- Increased scalability: There are several models of all-flash storage available in the market, meeting different business needs.
All flash storage vs. SSD
All flash storage is known for SSD (Solid State Drive) that has replaced the traditional HDD in various devices, from personal to corporate.
SSD flash memory is non-volatile, with no moving parts, it can be erased and reprogrammed in blocks. It allows erasable programmable read only (EEPROM) in just a single action or flash.
Therefore, the array can transfer information to solid state drives, SSDs, at a higher speed than mechanical disk drives.
And why is SSD flash memory so effective when compared to disk storage (HDD)? Because it has better overall bandwidth performance and lower latency when a tool triggers storage to query data.
In this sense, it is worth mentioning that the memory in an all flash storage usually comes as SSDs, as if it were an integrated circuit.
How to migrate to all flash storage?
With the decrease in price and the increase in the capacity of magnetic disks, the migration of a corporation’s data to flash storage becomes increasingly viable, which results in increased productivity.
To carry out data migration to all flash devices, one must be aware of the architecture offered by the supplier, as well as the software delivered with the equipment.
In addition, it is necessary to understand some questions to choose the best option, such as:
- what is the current demand and forecast of the future need of the company?
- What will be the useful life of the purchased equipment?
- how will the system respond during heavy use of the software?
- if there is an increase in workload, how will it impact the equipment?
Therefore, if you have a project to replace your current storage or need to improve the environment’s performance, consider an all-flash equipment. But, if you need really brutal performance, maybe it’s worth analyzing an array with NVMe disks, but that’s a subject for another article.
