Case for Flash

Our journey to address the data conundrum and subsequent storage requirements facing retail today has brought us to the final leg – The Case for Flash.

We began this series talking about the high volume, high velocity growth of data in retail that is expected to reach almost 40 zettabytes, or 300 times its 2005 levels by 2020, giving retailers pause to consider the consequences these activities will have on current infrastructures and storage strategies.

Logical First Steps

First invest in technology to connect enterprise data across all touchpoints. This is foundational and the most important stage. "Without a strong foundation, other strategies, such as Omni-Channel fulfillment, beacon deployment and product location, can't be executed effectively to meet the needs of the customer and the retailer. It all begins with a good data strategy.” (as quoted in Forrester research The Future of the Digital Store)

A good engine is called for. But, do keep in mind that you don’t always have to rip the engine out of a car to make it better. You can trick-it-out. Imagine assimilating all of your existing storage into a new system that makes the investments you have already made faster and stronger.

With IT budgets mostly flat, save specific situations, it is estimated that 75% of IT budgets are dedicated to just keeping existing systems running. That does not leave much money left to innovate. Meanwhile, data storage is among the fastest, if not the fastest-growing equipment expenditure for IT. CIOs and their staff are expected to improve service levels without necessarily increasing costs. In many IT organizations, the process for acquiring and managing storage is broken. Data is proliferating, in some organizations doubling in size every 18 to 24 months.

As stated above, achieving service levels is a common goal among savvy application owners and IT executives. What is much less well understood is how various storage technologies, when paired with complementary technologies such as real-time compression and a storage virtualization solution, dramatically improves data storage capacity, performance and overall storage costs for supporting mission-critical applications where the need for speed or lower latency is paramount.

You may simply need to you trick-out your own investment and deliver a storage strategy that will take you well into the future:

• Virtualization - the ability to aggregate previously siloed and disconnected storage devices into a large virtual pool of storage that is managed from a single interface and that offers advanced functionality and performance not previously available.
• Compression and De-duplication - the ability to compress data by removing unnecessary identical bits but still maintaining the integrity of the data to keep it viable.

Storage Technologies

Hard Disk Drives:

Processors have increased in speed by orders of magnitude over the years, but spinning hard disk drives (HDD) have not. This difference has created a substantial performance gap between how fast processors demand data and how quickly an HDD-based system can respond. This is called latency. The latency between a database and an existing hard disk-based storage array can cause performance bottlenecks that frustrate your customers.

Latency: Def.  the time required to locate the first bit or character in a storage location, expressed as access time minus word time.

Additional hard disks may be installed to increase the scale of performance, but adding hard disks does not improve access times. You cannot resolve this latency bottleneck by expanding the storage system and adding more hard disk drives. HDD speed lags behind processor speed because it is constrained by physical components.

How?

Conventional hard disk drives cannot deal with simultaneous high-demand read and write access requests. Databases that are heavy in both read and write access need performance that hard disk drives just cannot deliver. Again, adding more disks has been the traditional solution, despite the increasing cost of each stored bit.

Anytime you have to add excessive resources to resolve an issue, there is likely a more economical approach. Adding excessive capacity through additional disks is not the most economical approach in resolving the scalability of your online presence nor does it better the end user’s online experience.

Ironically, the best way to improve HDD data access speed while reigning in costs and lowering capacity demand is the introduction of a Flash storage layer to manage “hot” data and also to compress most data before it is stored or archived to HDD.

The Case for Flash:

• Flash - the technology used in high performance storage devices that replaces conventional spinning disk with solid state memory.  It holds tremendous advantages in terms of speed, reliability, power consumption, heat production.

[Just to set the record straight, this is a case for the technology of Flash and not a sales document for any particular product.]

The performance advantages of deploying enterprise-grade Flash is well known to most IT Executives. Yes, Flash storage not only improves data access time, it enables work that otherwise would not be possible. If a query that would take 5 seconds to run with data stored on Flash instead took almost 10 minutes using HDD, imagine the impact on the workflow of various professionals, including a sales associate trying to retrieve a potential buyer’s previous purchases or credit information.

So What is the Downside to Flash? HDD systems are priced lower per unit of storage when compared to flash.

However, despite conventional wisdom regarding the total cost of ownership (TCO) for high-performance storage, Flash is not 10x or 20x the cost of conventional performance-grade, spinning, hard disk drives (HDDs). The HDD portion of a conventional storage solution may represent less than 20% of the TCO, while the other 80%-plus is attributable to floor space, power and cooling, capacity growth, additional administration, maintenance, additional equipment, and software costs.

In Conclusion

Despite much wider adoption of Flash storage within the enterprise space, HDD is still the overwhelming favorite for meeting storage capacity needs. It is anticipated that Flash will continue to erode the current ratio of 30-to-1 HDD vs. SSD, especially as Flash prices continue to become competitive and the need for speed begins to encroach on previously non-mission-critical application workloads such as real-time analytics and database queries.

For almost 50 years, the conventional way of buying data storage was to focus primarily on capacity. If capacity were the only consideration, then HDDs would be less expensive by an order of magnitude or more. However, in today’s business environment, speed trumps capacity.

And, there is no question that Flash is faster and, viewed through the lens of performance, it is also a lot less expensive than HDDs. For the foreseeable future, enterprises will also need to manage their existing HDD assets as efficiently as possible.

More efficient storage/data infrastructures lead to decreased costs, which lead in turn to more affordable storage and more data being better stored and used. The new equation for storage success is about getting the maximum value from organizational data at minimal expense, with the least effort and the greatest speed. Companies that get serious about this equation now will find increased business success and innovation in IT strategies that will help them and their teams prosper in the increasingly competitive marketplace.