To solve efficiency gap, shrink the data center, not just data

SAN JOSE, USA: It's no surprise that the demand for data storage capacity in data centers has been growing at an astronomical rate.

Unrelenting data growth, driven by big data requirements, mobile data, cloud storage and connected devices - "the Internet of things" - is outpacing major improvements in power consumption, size and storage administration expenses and creating a data storage efficiency gap, according to experts at Skyera Inc.

This storage efficiency gap threatens to impose new cost pressures on enterprise IT with heavy spending demands on storage hardware, energy, floor space and storage administration. Gartner Inc. estimates that storage accounts for 32 percent of a data center TCO.

In a desperate attempt to get some control over this runaway data and data center growth, data deduplication has been identified as a potential contributor to improving the situation, but dedupe is not going to be the big great savior.

What's required is a disruptive, comprehensive jump in storage system efficiency that addresses the critical issues without budget-busting all-solid state arrays. In effect, the market needs a technology leap that not only reduces the data, but also slims down the entire data storage profile in the data center.

"Enterprise storage has long needed a dramatic efficiency transformation that addresses the not always congruent issues of size, capacity, power, performance and price," said Frankie Roohparvar, chief operating officer of Skyera.

"Individual technologies such as NAND flash and capacity optimization have moved the needle but have not produced the disruptive efficiency improvements commensurate with the new growth and application demands for enterprise storage."

Flash retrofitted to traditional storage architecture alone is not enough to close the efficiency gap so Skyera solved the problem by developing a completely new technology stack that maximizes the potential of flash storage technology and delivers game-changing efficiency enhancements with a compact array architecture that is orders of magnitude beyond other solutions.

Compared to other flash arrays on the market, Skyera arrays are radically more efficient with a 99 percent reduction in power and a 96 percent reduction in space requirements.

To appreciate the size and power efficiency of Skyera's technology consider that a single 1u Skyera flash array provides the same capacity as multiple full racks of performance disk-based storage systems.

Adding the cost for data center floor space and the expense of cooling those thousands of hard disk drives, it becomes obvious that it is financially burdensome to operate a data center with that much low-efficiency storage.

The benefits of high-efficiency Skyera storage also extend server efficiency. The extreme IOPS performance enabled with Skyera flash arrays completely mitigates the I/O blender effect of virtualized server environments that simply overwhelms disk-based arrays. This allows IT administrators to increase the virtual machine density on existing servers, optimizing utilization of powerful CPUs and eliminating the capital expense of purchasing additional servers to handle the highly-virtualized workload.