IBM Research

When I woke up this morning, I was pondering several storage projects that we are working on across the Islands. I was wondering if there was a way to affordably incorporate flash storage into some of the higher-end systems due to the SQL/database/Exchange workloads for those customers. My first thought was “Might as well stick with 15k SAS drives, cheap is still cheap.” Then I remembered a few years ago when the floods hit Southeast Asia wiping out many of the spindle-based manufacturers. And how cheap flash drives became as a result.

Well, for the business customer needing enterprise quality drives with 60k+ IOPS counts, that price is coming down further. In this article courtesy of Information Week, we learn that the tipping point is coming sooner rather than later. And that is great news for our Caribbean customers with large workloads in their storage arrays. As the old disks start to burn out, the reliability of flash can now be considered as a serious option.

“But flash doesn’t provide enough capacity!”

So let’s say we dump the old spindle systems in favor of flash, how are we going to get to address the terabytes of stuff we have accrued? What I am finding in a lot of our customers storage racks are generally outdated and older Dell, HP, or other arrays. None of them has looked into deduplication at the front end of storage. Cut actual capacity used by up to 40%, now that move to flash doesn’t look so bad, does it? Spindles, your end is near!

Enjoy the article, and look forward to more posts like this in the future.

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