Everyone is talking about how the future is on the public cloud, how your company will save lots of money when it simply outsources all of its infrastructure. But you know better. Yes, there is a place for the public cloud, but a smart company also takes care of what it holds dear. Considering the wealth of money, time and experience spent on honing your servers and their applications, shipping it all off to someone else’s backyard makes little sense.
Yet these cloud platforms appear to outperform local stacks. They just have so much power, girth and scale. Somehow your hand feels forced and if you want serious performance, you have to give up your technology entitlements. That or you need to spend a lot more to replace your systems and keep them competitive.
To answer a clearly rhetorical setup, no you don’t. Yet you are correct: it is important to keep the core of your digital domain as close to home as possible. Small companies and startups can wheel and deal with abandon on public cloud platforms, but enterprises require far more.
So how can you get the most out of your existing server infrastructure? Providing your technology is not caught in a legacy death spiral, where redundant systems are still being kept on life support, you should consider adopting all-flash arrays.
Flash is the new storage kid on the block and lightyears ahead of everything else. The speeds it brings to applications, data management and other tasks are mind-blowing: some organisations see as much as thirty times more speed, while even the lowest benchmarks easily deliver five to ten times more power.
What’s the secret? Unlike traditional storage mediums such as hard drives, flash storage has no moving parts. As a result it works faster, lasts longer and takes up far less space. The speed of flash is on show every day in your smartphone, on USB thumb drives and SD memory cards, even that solid state drive in your new laptop. The lifespan keeps being proven: traditional hard drives very rarely reach ten years of service, whereas flash alternatives are doing so quite comfortably.
As for space – well, you are going to love this. Flash storage puts far more on less, thanks to the incredible performance and groundbreaking compression systems. We have routinely reduced physical storage space in servers by huge steps. A quarter rack of flash drives offer as much storage as two entire racks of traditional drives. They also consume much less power and generate significantly less heat.
Traditional drives are not obsolete. They still have valuable roles to play, especially for long-term storage and ‘cold’ data functions. But all-flash arrays are a breed apart. They are the leading edge of performance storage, which also happen to deliver immense modernisation and savings at the server level. So if you feel your machines are becoming a bit too bulky, resource demanding and slow, look at what all-flash storage can do.
