LET’S PUT FLASH AND CHEAP IN ONE SENTENCE

Wouldn’t it be great if your employee is the bottleneck? Instead of your IT systems making everyone wait, resulting the average coffee consumption to sky rocket. We can’t make everyone the new Barry Allen (yes, I’m referring to The Flash) but your systems can be. When buying storage, you’re choosing between three main factors: performance, capacity and functionality. The conversation with a storage vendor will be about balancing all three, hoping that your business requirements and budget are aligned. Half way through the conversation the vendor mentions ‘flash’, knocking you back in your chair, and before the end of his sentence he surprisingly mentions ‘cheap’. What is this NetApp guy talking about?

When flash comes into play we can leave performance out of the equation. It comes down to capacity versus price, which is interesting since data is growing and IT budgets are clearly not. Leaving storage vendors with the following option to meet customers’ demands: Giving you the required capacity but selling it to you for much less. Yes, this is going to be a weird conversation.

THE ANSWER IS STORAGE EFFICIENCIES
This is the part where the Systems Engineer walks in and pulls out his/her toolkit. When using NetApp’s data management OS (ONTAP) there are many efficiency technologies possible for sizing to just the right capacity for any customers’ environment, enabling NetApp to sell effective capacity to their customers. Customers should not buy more than they require for their infrastructure and ending up with a bunch of empty shelfs full of flash. With effective capacity all of NetApp’s storage efficiency technologies are pre-calculated, meaning that if you buy 25TB of usable storage, you could end up having more than 100TB for your data. And we’re talking flash storage here, meaning a significant drop in your rack space, energy, and cooling costs. The choice for flash storage instead of traditional hard-disks (with caching) just became a realistic option.

HOW DO THEY DO IT?
In order to achieve this efficiency, the customer can use a combination of technologies which are embedded into ONTAP, including Inline Deduplication, Inline Compression and new with ONTAP 9 is Inline Compaction, which makes sure that all 4K blocks are completely filled by combining smaller blocks together. Any dataset can benefit from one or more efficiencies, and since these efficiencies are not mutually exclusive, the combination can make them even stronger. And let’s not forget Snapshots, FlexClones, Thin Provisioning and other efficiency technologies within ONTAP.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR THE CUSTOMER?
In the end this is giving the customer the required capacity, while speeding up the business with stunning performance numbers. For your business this means you can deploy your resources to create and innovate, rather than continuously focusing on how to make sure your IT can just deliver.