Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 11 | Page 14

LATEST INTELLIGENCE PRESENTED BY HOW TO EVALUATE ALL-FLASH STORAGE F Download whitepaper here lash storage was originally introduced as a premium performance tier. By substituting solid-state performance for mechanical disk drives, you could quickly and easily accelerate performance for dedicated databases and virtual desktop environments. Flash was also widely used to increase the input/output operations per second (IOPS) for hybrid systems that used both solid-state drives (SSDs) and spinning disk drives. However, the adoption of all-flash systems remained limited because SSD capacity was simply more expensive than disk capacity. More recently, though, the price of flash media has dropped dramatically. At the same time, 14 INTELLIGENTCIO process improvements in flash component design have enabled more information to be crammed into each device, leading to improved SSD density. The physical capacities of SSDs have now surpassed those of the largest hard disk drives, and the capacity advantage is expected to keep increasing for the foreseeable future. When combined with inline storage efficiency techniques, such as deduplication and compression, the cost of effective capacity (the amount of logical capacity after storage efficiencies are applied) for all-flash systems is now on par with that of disk systems, and all-flash systems have proven far superior to disks when comparing operational costs for power, cooling, space requirements, and management. www.intelligentcio.com