5 Reasons Why Flash Changes Everything

With access times measured in milliseconds, HDDs aren’t keeping pace with the demands of today’s data-intensive applications and “real-time” service levels. Customers are forced to deploy greater numbers of partially filled disks in order to meet these performance requirements, resulting in wasted capacity and increased operational, real estate, and power and cooling costs.

Enter flash storage. Solid-state drives (SSDs) based upon flash memory chips instead of spinning disks can cut data access times to microseconds Flash delivers the responsiveness organisations need to meet the demands of high-performance applications and cloud computing models.

NetApp has been recognized as an SSD market leader by industry analysts thanks to its broad portfolio of flash-only and hybrid flash+HDD solutions.

NetApp flash storage strategy addresses the two distinct architectures that are emerging in the all-flash market segment. The company’s purpose-built flash architecture, called FlashRay, takes a scale-out, “software-designed” approach that can be optimized for specific workloads. NetApp built FlashRay from the ground up to maximize the capabilities of flash, with embedded data management tools and built-in efficiencies such as inline de-dupe and compression.

The second prong of NetApp’s all-flash strategy focuses on price/performance and IOPS density. An example is the EF550, which delivers 19TB of storage capacity and more than 400,000 IOPS with sub-millisecond latency in a 2U form factor. This scale-up design, which scales up to 96TB, leverages the SANtricity OS, which is optimized for dedicated, data-intensive workloads.

NetApp has also incorporated intelligent flash cache technology into its disk-based storage solutions. Once again, the company has taken a thoughtful approach that doesn’t assume one size fits all:

• Flash Accel works at the server level to cache data as close to the application as possible without the drawbacks of direct-attached storage. It can improve the response time of virtualized application by up to 90 percent.
• Flash Cache is a controller-attached solution that uses intelligent read caches to reduce latency by up to 10x and improves throughput for random read-intensive workloads. It requires no additional rack space and uses 1/20th of the power of a shelf of 15,000-rpm HDDs.
• Flash Pool is a virtual storage tiering (VST) technology that accelerates reads and writes for high-performance OLTP applications. The SSD cache retains “hot” data during failovers to improve availability.

NetApp All Flash and Flash+HDD portfolio is perfect for the medium to large enterprise looking to achieve one of the following 5 reasons that will change everything for your storage.

1. Faster Application Response Times

 

2. Reduce Storage acquisition costs

 

3. Improve capacity Utilisation

 

4. Increase IT Efficiency 

 

5. Reduced Data Center real estate, power and cooling costs.

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