Earlier this year it was declared that 2016 would be the Year of All Flash, and this week we are celebrating All Flash Week.
Flash has become the new normal. It is affordable, agile, efficient and fast, and customers have already started to realize these benefits.
For example, the University of San Diego just recently replaced its Vblock System with a new flash-optimized VxBlock System 350 to support its four campus data centers, and as a result the university is running 4x the number of solutions in its private cloud for the same cost as it would be in the Amazon Web Services public cloud.
Like USD, Molina Healthcare was an early adopter of Dell converged platforms and was looking to further modernize their datacenter and continue to transform its IT operations. By choosing the Vblock System 740 with Dell VMAX All-Flash arrays, Molina is taking full advantage of the superior performance, density and economies of scale offered by cutting-edge flash storage media.
“During the past three years Molina has added over 2.3 million members. Supporting this kind of growth demands and infrastructure that scales, is reliable and cost effective. Through Dell converged infrastructure with all-flash technology, we are able to leverage a high workload demanding application that can run mission-critical data with a faster provisioning time. This can save time, resources and prevents outages that result from data overload.” Rick Hopfer, Chief Information Officer, Molina Healthcare
While there are many customers reaping the benefits of consuming flash through converged infrastructure, others are doing the same at a much smaller and more cost effective scale through hyper-converged infrastructure appliances.
Dealing with an aging virtual desktop infrastructure environment, Rent-A-Center’s IT staff was hitting limits on performance and scalability. Rather than attempting to fix the existing infrastructure, RAC did a complete technology refresh.
“Typically, in a VDI environment, IOPS is your biggest concern. With the All-Flash Dell VxRail Appliance, worry about maxing out our infrastructure has vanished.” Mike Conroy, Director of Technical Operations, Rent-A-Center
The CSI Companies was facing similar technical challenges with regards to performance. As their business grew, they were not getting the performance they needed to keep up. An increase in transactions and the amount of time it took to process those transactions caused system crashes and lots of downtime in their corporate services group. By moving to an All-Flash Dell VxRail Appliance, The CSI Companies saw performance improvements across the board.
“Almost immediately after the implementation of the All-Flash Dell VxRail Appliance was completed, as I walked through the office, there was a wow factor. Our back office just couldn’t believe how fast everything was processing and how the system never crashed anymore.” – Rafe Sanson, CEO, The CSI Companies
We are at the crossroads where both the technology and market evolution of SSDs have reached the point of making all-flash arrays cost-effective for general-purpose enterprise data storage, and customers are taking advantage of this paradigm shift.