Flash in the enterprise: Pain points continue to exist

BANGALORE, INDIA: Enormous amounts of data are being created today from a variety of sources such as transactional and decision support applications, analytics, content rich interactions, mobile devices and the cloud. This is impacting the velocity with which business is conducted in India. For CIOs and IT managers, dealing with these vast quantities of data presents a significant challenge at a time when budgets are limited and IT operations are increasing in complexity.

Yet, these challenges do not fully convey the pain points that continue to exist for enterprises dealing with data growth in a cost-effective manner. Compounding the task is the need to provide higher performance and enhanced responsiveness required in the most demanding environments. Enterprises are facing myriad challenges such as the vast quantities of data being generated in our digital universe, the ever-growing number of applications, the cloud, virtualization, and big data analytics.

Over the past five years, IT hardware and software spend has increased by almost 25 per cent. Business growth and the consequent need for more IT infrastructure might account for some of this, but several CIOs we have spoken to suspect that they ought get a bigger return on their IT investments. A number of IT trends have emerged in response, and one of the important ones is the use of flash storage in the enterprise market in India.

New Flash technologies have developed in many forms, achieving high reliability and extreme performance at consistently low latency. This makes the technology a perfect fit for customers where processing delays constrain the business. Areas where time to market and timely customer services are likely to be key competitive differentiators, and where consistent response times and performance is crucial, Flash is now receiving the attention it deserves.

Gartner, for example, estimates that the all flash storage market is going to approach £2.6 billion by 2015 and IDC believes that organisations will be moving the most frequently accessed application data that requires speed, power and performance onto flash storage, while lower priority applications will be kept on the cheaper hard disk alternatives. For example, an organisation processing high priority online customer transactions may decide to deploy the customer facing database on Flash technology, while workloads and data that do not require such extreme performance may be placed on lower cost, higher capacity Hard Disks.

Key considerations for Flash adoption

Flash is not universally beneficial, and its adoption should be highly strategic and targeted. The key question for organisations requiring extreme performance today is therefore how and where to adopt flash technologies in the application environment to gain the most benefits. Obviously, given the significant cost differential between flash and hard disk technology, the primary consideration will be workloads that would benefit most from low latency and extreme performance. A collateral benefit is the real estate and energy footprint savings. For example, Flash SSD drives consume about a third of the electricity of a similar hard disk drive.

Flash workloads and high-priority environments

While each organisation will have its own priority areas, Flash is usefully deployed in virtual desktop environments, for example, where many desktop images may need to be stood up quickly or need to share physical resources. Another area where Flash can offer substantial benefits is for databases that are mission critical and essential for efficient and reliable servicing of customer queries and orders. Today, a flash array can deliver many hundreds of thousands of input/output operations per second (IOPS) with sub-millisecond latency and are suited for transactional database-driven applications where responsiveness is critical.

Combining Flash and Hard Disks - a successful hybrid approach

An organisation that has implemented Flash storage to great advantage is global cosmetics brand Revlon. Revlon transformed its IT infrastructure from ground up, including creating a private cloud, building a global disaster recovery site and virtualising all resources. As part of the change programme, the company was able to lower storage costs by mixing solid-state disks and relatively inexpensive SATA drives within a single NetApp storage volume, termed "hybrid aggregate". Adding SSDs to the aggregate increased the performance of the busy SATA disks by a factor of ten. The use of NetApp software that combines server-based flash technology with intelligent caching to extend the virtual storage tier to enterprise servers has also allowed Revlon to use relatively inexpensive SATA disks by reducing latency by up to 50 per cent. The company is now able to perform 14,000 transactions per second, has increased storage capacity five times at the same cost and decreased data centre power consumption by 72 per cent, with flash technology having playing an important part.

Data Protection for Flash technology is still important

While Flash offers extraordinary levels of performance along with efficiency, energy and space benefits, it is no different from hard disk technology from a data protection perspective. Reliability was one of the key factors in readying the technology for enterprise use, as Flash wears out after prolonged usage. Flash products are therefore designed for a specific lifespan. Features that manage and control wear, such as wear levelling, are therefore key to the health and reliability of the Flash storage. Enterprise class Flash products which provide concise media reporting functionality and safeguards through mature integrated data protection functions such as RAID, SnapShot, Cloning and Replication are key differentiators driving Flash solution credibility and adoption. These remain the winners in today's Enterprise Flash storage market.

On the whole, the guiding principle should be to leverage flash to gain the best possible improvement in performance and reduction in latency for specific workloads. Flash is not a one-size-fits-all solution and it is important not to lose sight of the need to maintain a healthy and balanced long-term view of the organisation's storage requirements. Investing in consumer grade Flash to boost performance may offer attractive cost benefits on paper, but this approach can lead to higher operational costs and data protection issues as time goes by. The likelihood is that organisations will be moving key customer facing, business critical workloads to Flash. It therefore makes sense to take a strategic approach that considers all elements, including security, data protection, availability, management, control and scale to unlock the full value of Flash technology.

(Santhosh D'Souza is the Director- Systems Engineering, NetApp Marketing & Services Pvt Ltd India)