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Simplification in the management of infrastructure aids business level decision making , lowers overheads and delivers more efficiency .
While there are workloads which have traditionally been thought of as tier 1 flash-suitable , such as quick data requirements for relational databases , analytics or AI , now organisations should be leveraging flash for all workloads . The dynamic has changed and organisations are not just thinking of flash for performance anymore as there is no longer any justification for a disk or hybrid system .
Further adding support for an all-flash data centre is the competitive landscape . Some vendors chose iterative change when they started by repackaging existing solutions and programming their flash to work like a disk . Vendors who have been all-flash from day one do not have this baggage . The legacy approach ultimately does not meet modern requirements and creates more complexity as old HDDs are not developed with modern purposes in mind .
What makes this transition a reality now is cost efficiency driven by larger capacities and system
efficiency ; Pure Storage has announced 75TB drives with a roadmap that targets 150TB next year and 300TB within the next three years . Looking at the investment rate in HDD it is impossible to compete with the benefits and capabilities of all-flash .
In order to choose the right solution for a data platform , organisations need to take a step back and understand their data requirements , which can be complex . They need to consider what success looks like : how IT and data can support both wider business goals and create end user benefits .
Some of the complexity includes avoiding lock in ; enabling flexibility of data movement ; application development being done in containers ; and managing existing storage inefficiency as few start from a greenfield situation with nothing in their data centres . Understanding this should mean it is easier to identify a vendor who can support these needs .
Most , if not all organisations have a full range of needs for their data storage : fast access for immediate , customer facing applications ; scale-out unstructured data repository ; as well as cold data storage such as long term archive and back up .
These modern , but complex needs cannot be shoehorned in one specific storage format . Depending on an organisation ’ s goal , they should
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