I D C
A N A L Y S T
C O N N E C T I O N
Eric Burgener
Research Director, Storage
New Mixed Workload Consolidation Focus
for AF As For ces Customers to Look Beyond
Just Performance
April 2015
The market for all-flash arrays (AFAs) will reach $1.84 billion in 2015, and IDC expects it to grow at a
compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46.1% for the next five years. Enterprises are moving away
from dedicated application deployments for AFAs (where the array is brought in for a single
application) to a newer model that emphasizes mixed workload consolidation. The ability to support
dense mixed workload consolidation — in effect, to replace the primary enterprise storage
workhorses of the past — has become the key competitive battleground among AFA vendors, and
this is expanding the focus of these offerings not only to deliver performance but also to meet other
enterprise requirements such as high availability.
The following questions were posed by HP to Eric Burgener, research director for IDC's Storage
practice, on behalf of HP's customers.
Q.
Do AFAs need to offer high availability, or is performance enough?
A.
There are two primary deployment models for AFAs: dedicated application and mixed
workload consolidation. In dedicated application deployments, the AFA is specifically
purchased for an application that requires the highest performance, almost regardless of
cost. In this case, data services in the application can be leveraged to meet requirements for
high availability, and the AFA is expected to provide just high performance and data integrity.
In mixed workload consolidation deployments, the AFA is purchased as an alternative to an
enterprise storage array and will host multiple applications. In this scenario, array failures will
have a much broader impact on the business, and therefore the AFA is expected to meet
much higher availability requirements. As enterprises move more to the mixed workload
consolidation model, availability driven by array-based capabilities becomes increasingly
important.
Q.
Why has the requirement for availability increased in AFA deployments?
A.
Many enterprises that initially deployed AFAs for a dedicated application have been very happy
with the results, and they want to move more applications onto the platform for performance
reasons. This phenomenon is becoming widespread, and IDC expects that the ability of AFAs
to support dense mixed workload consolidation will be the defining competitive battleground for
AFA deployment in 2015 and beyond.
IDC 1891
Server consolidation on virtual infrastructure is a mainstream strategy in enterprises today,
combining older workloads such as databases, messaging and collaboration systems, and
home directories with newer workloads driven by mobile computing, social media, big data and
analytics, and cloud-based applications. The resulting virtual workloads are driving the demand
for consistent, sub-millisecond storage latencies that scale into the hundreds of thousands of
IOPS, and end-user requirements, driven by Web-based expectations, assume 24 x 7
availability. This new computing environment, which IDC refers to as "3rd Platform computing,"
is driving the demand for high performance and very highly available storage solutions.
IT organizations are now routinely expected to meet service-level agreements (SLAs) at the
five-nines level and above, and the new storage architectures necessary to deliver required
performance must also meet these stringent availability requirements.
Q.
Can the increase in availability requirements be characterized quantitatively?
A.
IDC primary research has tracked a trend of increasingly stringent availability and recovery
requirements over time. As enterprises become more dependent on IT infrastructure to
directly generate revenue, to drive production, or to deliver high-touch customer service, the
cost of downtime has increased as well. Just a few short years ago, many organizations did
not specifically know their cost of downtime or their recovery point objective (RPO) or
recovery time objective (RTO) requirements. Today, only 8% of organizations do not know
their cost of downtime, and 65% of organizations that do know it place it at between $20,000
and $100,000 per hour for their most critical applications. Nearly 85% of them have RPOs of
less than an hour, and 78% of them have RTOs of less than four hours.
Online businesses that generate revenues from ecommerce sites are particularly sensitive to
downtime. Retail companies like Amazon and eBay, financial services companies like eTrade
and PayPal, healthcare companies like Illumina and Pfizer, manufacturing companies like
Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi and Apple, and streaming media providers like Netflix
and Hulu — all of which have large online presences that directly generate revenue — can
very accurately calculate the opportunity cost of IT infrastructure failures, making it very easy
to cost justify the solutions necessary to meet "five-nines plus" availability requirements.
Innovative companies across all industries in the 3rd Platform computing era are inventing
new business models based around the Web, and for them, (up)time is money more than
ever before.
Q.
Beyond availability and resiliency, what are the other decision-making criteria
customers must consider when choosing an AFA?
A.
The AFA use case determines customer expectations. Dedicated application deployment is
quickly becoming a niche use case. Mixed workload consolidation deployment demands that
the AFA act as a direct substitute for the enterprise storage workhorse(s) it may be replacing.
Though the value of performance is undeniable, enterprises will not put their mission-critical
applications at risk to achieve it. AFA customers expect not only flash performance but also
that the array will measure up to enterprise requirements in the areas of availability, reliability,
scalability, security, and manageability. This means AFAs will have to support snapshots,
clones, encryption, data protection (RAID, erasure coding, etc.), replication, and the APIs
necessary for them to be easily integrated into preexisting datacenter workflows. With many
workloads running on a single array, managing data services at the application level is too
unwieldy — the required features must be provided by the array.
Quality of service (QoS) is a key requirement in any performance-sensitive environment
simultaneously supporting multiple applications. As IT departments are increasingly being
asked to commit to SLAs, performance must be delivered consistently as promised on an
application-by-application basis, regardless of what else may be going on in the system.
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©2015 IDC
3rd Platform computing workloads tend to exhibit bursts of I/O activity during certain times of
the day that may put performance at risk if array resources are not managed appropriately.
Look for controls that allow administrators to prioritize applications, ensuring they receive
what they need at all times but do not overconsume resources during bursts of activity.
AFAs may easily provide 10x the storage performance of legacy platforms, but the
increasingly dense 3rd Platform computing infrastructure will be pushing their limits in the
future, and administrators will absolutely need QoS controls.
Flash technologies are also ushering in a new set of expectations around the use of storage
efficiency technologies like thin provisioning, compression, deduplication, space-efficient
snapshots and clones, and replication based around delta differentials. With legacy hard disk
drive (HDD)–based architectures, these technologies often imposed performance impacts that
precluded their use in performance-sensitive primary storage environments. Flash
performance, as well as storage efficiency technology implementations specifically built for
flash media, has allowed these features to be widely used with even high-performance
application environments. Inline data compaction/reduction technologies can also help improve
flash endurance in these settings. Taken together, these technologies are fast becoming
baseline requirements in AFAs that will be used for mixed workload consolidation, helping
improve performance and endurance as they lower overall effective $/GB costs.
Q.
What technologies are coming after flash? And how will they impact storage
architectures?
A.
As flash becomes ubiquitous in datacenters, it will set new expectations about performance,
workload consolidation density, and energy and floor space consumption. Over the course of
the next 12 to 18 months, we will start to see application vendors modifying their applications
to deliver better performance, reliability, availability, scalability, and recoverability — just as
we did in the 1980s as software vendors optimized their wares to perform better with HDDs.
As virtual infrastructure penetrated mainstream computing, one of the key mismatches was
between increasing processor performance and lagging storage performance. Flash has
emerged as an excellent solution to that problem in today's environment, and it is why IDC
recommends that all datacenters deploy flash technology in at least some capacity in their
primary storage environments.
Processing power will continue to increase, and newer storage technologies will be required
to keep IT infrastructure operating in a balanced manner. Memory-based technologies like
nonvolatile memory (NVM) promise to increase storage performance density in a manner that
meets enterprise requirements.
As new processors/memory/storage hierarchies evolve, new optimizations will be required to
maximize the value they bring to enterprises. Disk optimization was a common development
focus with HDD-based systems, just as flash optimization is with today's AFAs. The key longterm trend here is to perform I/O optimizations specific to each new computing infrastructure
as it evolves, and we should expect more of it in the future. As infrastructure density
increases over time with new storage technologies, as measured by metrics like IOPS/TB,
effective TB/U, and increasing application density, management tools will need to evolve as
well to enable administrators to meet SLAs.
©2015 IDC
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A B O U T
T H I S
A N A L Y S T
Eric Burgener serves as a research director for IDC's Storage practice, which includes Storage Systems, Software, and
Solutions research offerings; quarterly trackers; and end-user research as well as advisory services and consulting
programs. Mr. Burgener's areas of coverage include flash-based arrays (all-flash arrays and hybrid flash arrays) as well as
storage virtualization solutions. A veteran of the storage industry for almost 30 years, he has worked with enterprise storage
technologies since 1991, including both hardware and software-based solutions. Prior to joining IDC, he held various
leadership positions in product management, product marketing, business development, and technical support and worked
as an Executive in Residence at Mayfield, a leading Silicon Valley–based venture capital firm. Mr. Burgener holds an
undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley.
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