F Special Part 3: Not a Flash in the pan

INDIA: Just why is Flash is appearing in so many conversations, is not just a variable of a new-fangled technology talk but also the way it affects some business denominators.

As an insightful Andrew Reichman from Forrester reckons, efficiency technologies like deduplication and snapshot copies will allow flash to be deployed for cheaper in real terms, and will make it more ubiquitous.

“These types of technologies could further eliminate disk by reducing the logical cost of flash. On the other hand, automated tiering could make it easier to use a combination of flash and disk in systems, with intelligent data placement keeping costs down.”

Change is in the undercurrents, but it will take time before it cascades everywhere.

Richard Partridge, VP and Senior Analyst, Enterprise Servers, Ideas International points out that just as cache/memory implementations have evolved over the years, so too the best deployment of SSDs will evolve as the technology matures.

Catch some numbers doing the rounds, and it is hard to miss flash’s arrival. This September, in the findings of a customer survey IBM hinted at the pent-up demand for solid-state disk technology as a successor to flash and hard-disk drives. Customers are embracing high-performance solid-state disks to support growing data storage demands driven by cloud computing and analytics technologies, it mentioned.

The survey conducted by Zogby International in August 2011 on behalf of IBM, showed that there was a need for a new class of storage that can expand the market for solid-state drives (SSDs) by combining increased data delivery with lower costs and other benefits. Nearly half (43 percent) of IT decision makers said they have plans to use SSD technology in the future or are already using it. 

Nearly half (48 percent) said they plan on increasing storage investments in many areas and therein flash memory/solid state constituted an interesting 24 per cent level.

The reasons are beyond guesstimates. As per the survey, these new storage technologies could also alleviate critical budget, power and space limitations facing IT administrators. 

Another survey carried out by data recovery company Kroll Ontrack, accentuates the enthusiasm around Flash.

It is a no-brainer that data storage technology is trending toward SSD both on an enterprise and consumer level and as this survey underlines, of the more than 500 survey respondents consisting of business, home and government users, nearly 70 per cent revealed that they currently use or plan to use SSD/Flash technology in the near future. 

The reasons cited are increased performance with SSD/Flash devices in contrast to traditional hard drive technology; a safer, more robust storage technology alternative that is less of a power guzzler and more of an environment buddy.

But at the same time, the IBM survey also demonstrated that some (71 percent).survey respondents who are not currently using SSD said cost was the reason. 

Kroll Ontrack survey too shows that while more than 90 per cent of respondents perceive SSD/Flash failure rates to be minimal and the technology to be reliable, 57 per cent of respondents have experienced data loss with SSD/Flash technology. 

Now, about three quarters of respondents consider the recovery of data from SSD/Flash to be nearly impossible or complicated, indicating respondents are skeptical of the feasibility of SSD/Flash recovery when it is needed.

As Reichman suggests, using flash as cache instead of persistent storage is another way, to make this work without excessive effort. 

Sweeping across data centres at enterprise level expectations is something that won’t happen in a flash as it turns out. There are some questions that Flash still has to answer, or let’s say rearrange in the algebraic world of enterprise data.

For now, the hypothesis is pretty ready.