The Next Big Game Changer:
Democratization of
All-Flash Storage
Table of Contents
Leveraging the Business
Benefits of Affordable
All-Flash Storage............................2
Deploying a Fully Featured,
No-Compromise All-Flash
Solution.............................................3
Choosing the Right Solution.......4
Taking the Next Step.....................4
All-flash storage has been a game changer for enterprise IT. Deployments have
grown so rapidly that IDC had to revise its market projections upwards for both
2014 and 2015. The market for all-flash solutions reached $1.6 billion USD two years
earlier than expected, and the research firm increased its projections to $2.24
billion USD for 2015, up from the previous $1.8 billion USD.1
Yet, while it’s clear that flash has been a game changer, it’s also true that the
game has been pretty heavily stacked in favor of larger enterprises. These have
been the customers that could reasonably afford to purchase all-flash arrays
with the richest set of enterprise-class features and the highest levels of reliable,
consistent performance.
But the game is about to change once again. The entry-level price point for a
fully featured all-flash array that doesn’t compromise on performance, reliability or
anything else has come down dramatically in 2016. In fact, an all-flash array with
25TB of effective usable capacity can now be purchased at a price point of less
than $50,000 USD.
This is an important breakthrough for the technology itself and, more significantly,
it allows a much broader group of customers to leverage the business and
operational benefits of all-flash storage.
1 “Flash-Based Storage is Growing Faster Than Expected,” Bloomberg Business, Aug. 12, 2015
Now, even small and midsize enterprises can easily
afford to deploy their own all-flash arrays rather than risk
using their applications on a cloud service or another
solution that requires some level of compromise, either
in performance, reliability, control, cost, complexity or
all of the above. Larger enterprises can now use these
low-cost yet enterprise-proven all-flash arrays to support
new initiatives, quickly deploy test and development
environments and/or improve the performance of businesscritical applications in branch offices.
In some ways, this is the beginning of the “democratization”
of all-flash storage. And for many organizations, it’s not
coming a moment too soon.
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Leveraging the Business
Benefits of Affordable
All-Flash Storage
If you are the IT manager at a small or midsize enterprise,
or a healthcare facility, government agency or local
school district, chances are you are facing many of the
same challenges as your counterparts at Fortune 500
companies—only you have a smaller staff and, in all
likelihood, tighter budget restrictions.
Today’s IT issues tend to be consistent across almost all
organizations, driven by a set of common themes that
are forcing organizations to reassess and, in some cases,
transform how they are delivering and deploying IT. Among
these key themes:
PG. 2
•
Consumerization: Employees and customers
expect the same level of performance and speed
in their business interactions as they do in the
consumer world. New applications have to be
developed quickly and the business has to be
mobile-enabled.
•
Performance: This follows on the theme of
consumerization. Application performance cannot
lag, transactions have to be processed quickly and
customer needs have to be addressed at all times
or else the customer will simply go somewhere
else.
•
Complexity: IT teams have to reduce complexity
and embrace faster deployments through
automation, orchestration and cloud models that
simplify provisioning, limit the risk of human error
and eliminate downtime.
•
Data growth: Data is continuing to grow at a
staggering pace, pretty much doubling every
two years. A major portion of that data is of the
unstructured variety. Today’s storage solutions
have to deal with this growth in a cost-efficient
manner.
•
IT as a service: The role of IT is changing quickly
to a service-centric model. IT infrastructures have
to support functions such as resource pooling,
self-service provisioning, elastic scalability and
automatic chargebacks.
One of the reasons all-flash storage is a game-changing
technology is that it enables IT teams to address each
of these challenges. All-flash arrays deliver dramatic
performance improvements over traditional spinning
disk, particularly for any IOPS-intensive application like
a database. Many enterprises have reached the point
where they won’t even consider spinning disks for tier-one
applications anymore.
Beyond performance, all-flash solutions deliver other
important benefits. The right solution will address data
growth by using advanced compression and deduplication
technologies to significantly reduce the physical data
footprint and associated colocation expenses, which are
typically incurred on a per-rack unit or per-floor tile basis.
In addition, certain all-flash arrays are virtually plug-and-play
devices that can be provisioned in minutes. All-flash storage
also supports mixed workloads and resource pooling to
enable the cloud-like functionality and flexibility IT teams are
seeking as they transition to service-centric delivery models.
•
Enterprise-grade reliability: An all-flash array can
deliver greater than five-9s availability with 100%
performance during maintenance and failures.
•
Transformational simplicity: Certain all-flash
arrays are simple plug-and-play devices that
can be deployed in minutes and require virtually
no ongoing management. As a small or midsize
enterprise, you don’t need storage specialists to
provision, deploy or manage the solution.
•
Easy expandability: Certain all-flash arrays are
offered with flexible deployment models that enable
you to scale the solution modularly as
part of an ongoing services agreement. You
never have to go through data migrations and
you can keep your solution current with the latest
technology upgrades.
•
Data reduction technologies: With an all-flash
array you can use compression and deduplication
technologies that are simply not available in
traditional spinning disk arrays. All-flash arrays can
typically reduce data by a ratio of at least 3:1 and
potentially more, depending upon the application
or workload.
Deploying a Fully Featured, NoCompromise All-Flash Solution
However, if you are the IT manager at a small or midsize
enterprise, or a healthcare facility, government agency
or local school district, chances are you haven’t yet
experienced all of the myriad benefits of a fully featured allflash array. The price point was probably too high to justify
the investment.
Which isn’t to say you haven’t experienced the joy of flash.
As pressure has mounted to deliver greater performance for
critical applications, you may have purchased a flash storage
service from a public cloud provider. Or maybe you tried a
hybrid solution that provides some performance gains by
using flash as a cache within a traditional spinning disk array.
If you have used these types of solutions, you’ve likely
had to make compromises in areas such as performance,
security, reliability, consistency or cost. Cloud-based flash
services can be quite expensive and can’t deliver the
reliability or performance consistency of a fully featured onpremises solution. After all, you can’t build a six-9s service
on top of a four-9s cloud data platform. Hybrid solutions
lag in performance versus all-flash arrays and, rather than
simplifying your deployments, add new levels of complexity
that mitigate their value.
If you have tried these solutions—or if you have avoided
them because of their limitations—you are probably
ready for a real all-flash array that doesn’t force any
compromises. So what does that look like? Here are
some factors to consider:
•
PG. 3
No-worry performance: A fully featured all-flash
array will deliver consistent performance, which is
extremely important in today’s cloud environments.
With the right solution you will be able to perform
up to 100,000 32K IOPS with an average latency of
less than 1 millisecond.
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Choosing the Right Solution
The question you may be asking is this: How and when did
all this happen? Perhaps the last time you researched an
array with all of these features and capabilities you were
quoted a price of $250,000 or $300,000 USD or more,
depending upon the capacity. Now you are being told you
can get all of these features in an all-flash array for less
than $50,000 USD.
The big breakthrough is coming from one of the leading
innovators in the all-flash market, Pure Storage. Pure has
scaled its architecture to make all of its key enterpriseclass features available in an entry-level array that
“democratizes” all-flash storage by making it affordable to
just about any business. The new product is called the
Pure FlashArray//m10.
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worry abou
simply by adding more flash capacity and controllers
completely non-disruptively. Your applications keep running
at full performance even while you do the upgrade. No
maintenance windows are required.
This simple scalability is valuable for both SMBs as well
as larger enterprises. Say, for example, you want to use
all-flash storage to support the rollout of an important new
initiative such as virtual desktop infrastructure. You can
start with a FlashArray//m10 to deliver the performance and
capacity for your initial deployment, then expand it as your
needs change. Or if you are ready to replace an existing
array, you can now try all-flash storage without taking the
risk of purchasing a $300,000 USD solution.
The FlashArray//m10 doesn’t compromise on any of the
features or functions available in any of the Pure Storage
enterprise-class arrays. Customers can leverage the
performance, reliability and simplicity benefits of Pure allflash storage solutions, as well as the unique Evergreen
StorageTM pricing and maintenance model that simplifies
upgrades and eliminates migrations. Most importantly, with
Evergreen Storage you don’t have to re-buy your capacity
every time you upgrade to the latest generation.
Taking the Next Step
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Eric Cornw
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Tour de Fo
For the under-$50,000 USD entry point, you can get an
array that gives you a maximum capacity of 25 TB of usable
storage. For most small or midsize businesses this is more
than enough to run all of your production applications and,
in many cases, your entire company. One of the additional
benefits is that you can scale easily as your needs grow,
It’s taken just a little bit of time, but the democratization
of all-flash storage is finally at hand. Companies of any
size can now afford a fully featured no-compromise allflash array that leverages the performance, reliability, cost
efficiencies, simplicity and scalability of the industry’s most
innovative all-flash architecture. Are you ready to discover
how all-flash storage can be a game changer for your
business? Please contact Pure Storage at http://www.
purestorage.com/cloud for more information.
Note: All specifications for FlashArray//m10 are preliminary and subject to finalization before GA.
PG. 4
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