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DSA FlASh in A FlASh IntervIew serIes

IntroductIon: dsa P1

IntroductIon: solIdfIre P2

solIdfIre P3

dell P4

eMc P5

HItacHI P6

netaPP P7

Pure storaGe P8

tIntrI P9

vIolIn MeMory P10

COnTEnTS:

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inTRODUCTiOn froM tHe edItor

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Enterprise Flash Storage has been one of the industry’s hottest technologies over the last couple of years. It’s not just hype, adoption of flash storage is now mainstream and every storage vendor has some kind of flash offering.

The flash vendor landscape is vibrant with traditional storage vendors adding flash offerings to their overall portfolio and numerous new vendors entering the market with flash only products designed from the ground up to optimise flash technology.

The sheer number of Flash Storage Vendors with their multiple offerings has meant a minefield of analysis and investigation for IT departments attempting to decide which Flash offering is right for them. Every flash vendor has a slightly different story to tell and we decided we would give them all a chance to tell it.

Our flash in a flash interview series was designed to ask the same high level questions to multiple flash vendors so that readers could compare their answers and try to get a feel for the strengths, weaknesses and focus areas vendor by vendor.

The series proved to be hugely popular so we took the step of collating all of the interviews into this single e-book to provide a single point of reference and easy comparison across each interview.

The content is not deep, but it is fascinating to see the answers side by side, and really does give excellent macro level insight for people wanting to get a feel for where they should fine tune their search for the right flash provider.

Yours in Data and Storage Allan Guiam

inTRODUCTiOn froM krIs day of solIdfIre

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Advances in automation technology are rapidly changing how IT is being delivered as enterprises look to turn IT into a strategic business enabler. However, one of the biggest challenges is the slow rate of innovation in storage compared with other parts of the data centre. The rise of automation, cloud, and software-defined approaches are changing the way data centres are architected. The storage industry has undergone more change in the past five years than in the previous 15 years combined.

“Complex problems require complex solutions.” That seems to be the mantra when it comes to storage systems. SAN infrastructures have become increasingly complex as old storage architectures try to meet newer user demands. The most predominant issue has become the delivery of availability and predictable performance within the economics of a shared infrastructure. Troubleshooting storage performance problems has become a technical nightmare. Operational complexity gets even more scary when you bring up the nastiest word in IT, MIGRATION.

The good news is that there are more modern storage technologies that can alleviate many of the operational challenges brought on by traditional storage systems. Your complex storage problems can be solved with simpler, automated solutions. The availability of flash storage at scale has accelerated the ability to deliver this. This market disruption has attracted external investment into more agile and innovative companies building the storage systems designed for your new world.

Traditional storage vendors have struggled with this fast developing market. They have built multi-billion dollar disk storage businesses and supply chains. The smarter ones have acquired innovation to try to disrupt themselves. The worst believe they are innovating at the new speed required, despite the evidence all around them: falling market shares, declining revenues, and perhaps most telling, talented employees leaving.

Flash is driving the next generation of storage, but flash alone will not get you where you need to be. To ensure any degree of usability, speed must be accompanied by quality of service (QoS) controls that govern performance to ensure each application receives the allocation it needs to run effectively. Modern, scale-out, all-flash storage can now dramatically reduce your shared-infrastructure costs by aligning capacity purchases more closely with your needs.

Deciding whether or not to change storage technologies and vendors is a difficult decision. Unlike other data centre components, a data migration is almost always needed. The more data you have, the harder and more painful it is, and as a result, many organisations have quite understandably stuck with the same approach for years.

But the storage landscape has changed as a result of flash media, cloud automation, and software-defined approaches. Traditional storage systems are no longer fast, simple, or reliable enough and are being replaced by more agile, predictable, and innovative storage solutions. Adoption of these next generation solutions is quickly becoming a business imperative, not just a technology one. Inertia can cause real, long-term business damage.

To learn how to achieve greater innovation in your storage platform visit solidfire.com.

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1 – All FlASh OR hybRiD?There is no doubt that the future of the primary storage industry is Flash. Hybrid storage arrays are a bridging technology between the old world of disk, and the future. It is now possible for All Flash storage arrays to be used for the majority of primary storage requirements.

2 – WhAT’S TRUly UniqUE AbOUT yOUR FlASh OFFERing?SolidFire’s All-Flash architecture is unique in many ways. Unlike the vast majority of Flash storage arrays, our scale-out storage platform is engineered for next generation data centres. We offer flexible, linear scalability of both capacity and performance. Uniquely we guarantee performance, even when sharing storage across many applica-tions. We have the ability to automate 100% of the storage infrastructure, superior availability and always-on efficiency features. Combined together, this makes it possible for All Flash to be considered for a far wider range of data centre applications.

3 – ARE iOPS EvERyThing? WhAT ElSE ShOUlD PEOPlE COnSiDER WhEn SElECTing FlASh STORAgE?Flash is certainly fast. Typically 10x faster than traditional disk systems. However, performance is not much use with out control. You have to be able to allocate, manage and guarantee storage performance independent of capacity. Quality of Service control allows you to give applications the IOP performance they require, even in failure scenarios. To make the economics of Flash work, you also have to be able to share the infrastructure. The only way to achieve this is by being able to guarantee performance and eliminate the effects of ‘noisy neighbours’.

4 – iS ThERE Any CUSTOmER TyPE ThAT yOUR FlASh OFFERing iS nOT SUiTED TO?More traditional silo’ed storage projects are typically not a good fit for us. Solidfire’s All Flash storage is purpose built for the next generation of data centres. Highly virtualised or cloud environments are the perfect fit for SolidFire. Those customers looking at VMware Cloud, OpenStack, CloudStack….

5 – WhAT’S yOUR TARgET mARkET in SOUTh ASiAWe are focussed on the ASEAN region for 2015 with a particular focus on Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. We are in the process of expanding our channel coverage and are already seeing demand from a wide range of enterprises in these areas.

FlASh in A FlASh SERiES FROm SOliDFiRE krIs day, ManaGInG dIrector aPJ, solIdfIre.

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1 – All FlASh OR hybRiD?Choosing All-Flash or Hybrid arrays is dependent on the technology being employed. Typical All-Flash arrays uses 100% SLC (Single-Level Cell) based SSD drives to deliver IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) for both Reads and Writes. The limitation to All-Flash arrays, however, is that the cost of SLC SSD (Solid State Drives) is high, especially when high capacity LUNs (Logical Unit Numbers) are required.

Dell’s approach to All-Flash is unique within the industry: using SLC drives for Writes and MLC (Multi-Level Cell) drives for Reads. The cost of MLC drives are also signifi-cantly lower than SLC drives, as Dell’s All-Flash solutions have the capability to “move” data between SSD drive types, using its industry leading Fluid data tiering technology.

Dell further enhances this data tiering technology in its hybrid arrays, as incoming writes to Flash first. When the data is no longer “hot”, it is then tiered down to low cost SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) disk or even NL-SAS (Near Line SAS) disk, where price per GB is the lowest in the industry.

2 – WhAT’S TRUly UniqUE AbOUT yOUR FlASh OFFERing?As mentioned in the first question, the unique factor about our flash offering is the ability to tier data between Reads and Writes. This capability is even available with the Dell Storage SC4020 Entry-Level All-Flash configuration, which provides an economical solution to an All-Flash storage array.

3 – ARE iOPS EvERyThing? WhAT ElSE ShOUlD PEOPlE COnSiDER WhEn SElECTing FlASh STORAgE?IOPS is a contributing factor in choosing your Flash storage, however, customers should consider the following when selecting Flash Storage:

The lower price per GB that can be achieved, without sacrificing IOPS required

The ideal workloads/applications for this Flash storage (i.e. read performance)

Total Cost of Ownership, which includes how much would it cost to add capacity down the road

4 – iS ThERE Any CUSTOmER TyPE ThAT yOUR FlASh OFFERing iS nOT SUiTED TO?No. Considerations, however, should be given to qualify a customer’s IOPS and capacity requirements. This is where a correct sizing exercise is recommended. In many cases, the high IOPS that Flash provides is not needed. In this case, SAS or NL SAS disk will give a lower price per GB.

5 – WhAT’S yOUR TARgET mARkET in SOUTh ASiAIt has been Dell’s strategy for the past several years to bring high-end enterprise storage capabilities to companies of all sizes and this also applies to our Flash offerings. This is yet another example of Dell making world class technology more accessible to customers who have tight budgets and who don’t want to sacrifice on quality and performance.

FlASh in A FlASh SERiES FROm DEll wIllIaM tan, Head of enterPrIse solutIons, dell MalaysIa

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1 – All FlASh OR hybRiD?The decision is dependent on the customer needs.

Current applications are dependent on complex infrastructure to mitigate the ever increasing gap between compute and the underlying spinning media. Flash is a mega disruptor from a technology standpoint and an enabler and has created the opportunity to not only deliver massive I/O performance but to transform ease of use, enterprise rich capabilities and business value.

The cost of Flash is no longer the hindrance due to the advanced data reduction and advanced snapshot technologies.

With relatively little investment, All Flash Arrays can be used for enterprise data centers.

The purchase price of All-flash storage arrays is higher than of a hybrid storage but operating costs are lower, so in long term all-flash could be more cost effective.

2 – WhAT’S TRUly UniqUE AbOUT yOUR FlASh OFFERing?XtremIO provides tightly coupled scale-out design that grows according to the customers’ needs with additional performance and capacity added in a building block approach. XtremIO’s advanced architecture ensures that maximum performance is maintained as the system scales.

XtremIO provides inline, always-on, global data reduction. On XtremIO arrays, only

unique data is ever placed on flash, reducing capacity requirements and increasing flash endurance. Data reduction is never switched off and never post-processed. XtremIO writable snapshots enable new possibilities, consolidate different application silos into smaller footprint, develop and deploy applications faster by giving each engineer a high performance application test/development sandbox, create on-demand analytics and reporting.

Simply put, XtremIO delivers more performance and usable capacity with less overhead, energy consumption, heat generation and rack space.

EMC’s VMAX can virtualize hybrid and all-flash systems into a single ecosystem. The VMAX, VNX, VNXe and Isilon products can also be configured as either hybrid or all-flash. Thus, users can enter at any point and evolve the solution as requirements change over time.

EMC views the market horizontally. EMC can offer traditional HDD arrays to the more budget-conscious buyer, hybrid configurations to those needing more performance and all-flash for situations that demand guaranteed quality of service.

3 – ARE iOPS EvERyThing? WhAT ElSE ShOUlD PEOPlE COnSiDER WhEn SElECTing FlASh STORAgE?IOPS is just one of the metrics and organizations should consider storage platforms which set the foundation of all flash data center.

Data centers are grappling with the data growth which leads to bigger storage footprint and complexity. Hence, the Next Generation Flash storage platform should provide operational efficiency and management efficiency as well. The key to addressing constant capacity demands is to leverage storage efficiency technologies like Thin provisioning, inline compression and inline deduplication. All of these data services remain ‘ON’ without any

compromise on the performance which means consistent sub milliseconds latency.

4 – iS ThERE Any CUSTOmER TyPE ThAT yOUR FlASh OFFERing iS nOT SUiTED TO?We believe Flash is suitable for wide variety of applications. According to Gartner, this is the real opportunity for all-flash arrays such as XtremIO - finally consolidating all of your storage and eliminating the wasteful islands of storage today.

Database and analytics was the original workload for flash acceleration, but XtremIO takes the shared storage benefits to a whole new level for database infrastructure consolidation across multiple instances with snapshots and cloning for development & test, on-demand reporting, and real-time analytics. The same capabilities enable major acceleration and consolidation benefits for related workloads like SAP Landscapes.

For virtual servers and private cloud deployments, customers are getting massive workload consolidations on a common XtremIO platform, with the most demanding IO mission critical apps finally able to be virtualized without compromising their service level agreements. And virtual desktop infrastructures have finally been unleashed, with massive deployments over 100,000 desktops across all user and desktop types.

5 – WhAT’S yOUR TARgET mARkET in SOUTh ASiAWe see a great potential in the South East Asia markets, especially Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand where the growing amount of data due to high adoption of mobile devices is creating massive amounts of data which needs to be stored, managed and analyzed.

Mature markets like Singapore and Malaysia are also continuously shifting to flash technologies, so there is definitely room to grow.

FlASh in A FlASh SERiES FROm EmC aMIt sHarMa, advIsory systeMs enGIneer.

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1 – All FlASh OR hybRiD?Both can have a place in a data center but we believe that a hybrid array, with tiering software, provides more versatility and better overall economy. As data ages and is infrequently accessed, it may not be appropriate to store it on flash. The ability to automatically move older data to either a lower cost tier within the array or to an archival system will provide an optimized cost structure.

However, there are use cases where tiering is not really necessary and an all flash array works very well here. An example of this might be a video surveillance facial recognition system where the data, all of the data, needs to be queried for matches at the fastest possible rate.

2 – WhAT’S TRUly UniqUE AbOUT yOUR FlASh OFFERing?Hitachi engineers designed our own flash devices which carry more than 60 patents. The key innovation here is the micro controller on board our flash modules. This quad-core ASIC enables hardware offloading of flash storage functions which allows the I/O path to optimize bit transports. These functions include wear leveling, block and page remapping, compaction of 0 or 1 write streams, garbage collection and more. Our storage systems also have a flash optimized operating system which recognizes I/Os to flash devices and gives them higher thread counts and faster internal movements. In fact, the flash optimized software can double the performance of a system.

The proof of our capabilities came in the recent world record results we achieved in a Storage Performance Council benchmark test (SPC-1). Our VSP G1000 was the first storage system to reach more than 2,000,000 IOPS. Even at this massive IOPS load, the average system response time to an I/O request stayed under 1 millisecond.

3 – ARE iOPS EvERyThing? WhAT ElSE ShOUlD PEOPlE COnSiDER WhEn SElECTing FlASh STORAgE?Well, response times are also very important. This is particularly relevant at high IOPS loads. If the storage system isn’t capable of maintaining fast response times at peak periods, then the application users won’t see the speed of flash.

Besides performance and automatic tiering, we also believe that robust data protection is also critical. Applications that require the highest performance usually need maximum uptime. So the fault tolerance of a system needs to be evaluated as does its ability to failover in the event of a localized outage.

Another point to consider is scalability. How well does a flash system perform as more capacity and more IOPs are added? If the ceilings are low, then more and more point solutions will need to be deployed which leads to higher costs and more administration burdens.

4 – iS ThERE Any CUSTOmER TyPE ThAT yOUR FlASh OFFERing iS nOT SUiTED TO?We specialize in designing systems for the highest scalable, data availability and performance levels. If the environment requires flash capacity that is fairly small in size, not expected to grow rapidly and can tolerate an outage, then we may not have the optimal solution.

5 – WhAT’S yOUR TARgET mARkET in SOUTh ASiAOur flash customers are mainly large and enterprise account who deploy our flash solutions as part of an integrated strategy for delivering IT services within their organizations. They range across industries from financial services to retail to e-commerce to telecom to transportation and many more. We shipped nearly 100 petabytes of flash capacity last year so we are clearly a leading player in this market.

FlASh in A FlASh SERiES FROm hiTAChi saravanan krIsHnan, senIor dIrector, storaGe PlatforMs & solutIons BusIness, aPac, HItacHI data systeMs

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1 – All FlASh OR hybRiD?Increasingly hybrid storage is providing the best of both worlds. Businesses of today face the need to increase their capacity requirement and improve performance of their storage subsystem. On top of that, it is critical for businesses to reduce costs and resources needed to operate and manage.

Standard benchmarks will rule that flash dominates on price/performance indicators and traditional hard disk storage rules out all competition when it comes to price/capacity. While it ultimately depends on the priorities and workload of the business, hybrid storage offers the happy middle ground.

2 – WhAT’S TRUly UniqUE AbOUT yOUR FlASh OFFERing?NetApp prides itself in having one of the strongest and broadest flash portfolios in the industry (Flash Cache, Flash Pool, EF flash arrays, all-FAS flash, hybrid arrays,

and FlashRay) to provide flexibility and choice to maximize the value of flash across the entire compute, network, and storage stack for our customers. NetApp’s flash portfolio also integrates seamlessly with other products and the cloud as most customers will need to balance performance with capacity.

One of the unique features of NetApp’s recently launched EF560 all-flash array is its achievement as the leading Storage Performance Council SPC-1 Price-Performance for all-flash arrays with an average response time of less than one millisecond, at $0.54/SPC-1 IOPS.

Most workloads need a combination of both flash and hard drives to achieve a good combination of performance and capacity. This is NetApp’s strength. One cannot just have Ferraris driving down the streets of Singapore. Having an efficient public transport network, such as the MRT, is equally important to serve the needs of the everyday commuters. Not only do we provide superior all-flash arrays, we also complement them by combining with spindle based hard disks. At NetApp, we strive to build enterprise quality products together with the highest quality of support.

3 – ARE iOPS EvERyThing? WhAT ElSE ShOUlD PEOPlE COnSiDER WhEn SElECTing FlASh STORAgE?IOPS is an important metric for flash storage options. However there are other factors users need to consider when making their selection. Flash is a premium storage media currently and hence users need to make careful considerations as to where and how to deploy it. Users should start their selection process with their expected workload in mind. The workload will in turn define which parameters are important – IOPS, Latency, capacity, cost, resilience, supportability, storage efficiency features, the wear cycle etc. These are some of the parameters users

need to keep in mind when deploying flash. For example, if it is for transactional applications like in banks, then latency should be of topmost consideration. If it is a high performance application that needs quick ingest, then IOPS may be critical. Enterprises that require more supportability features with a rendering application should also consider the resilience of the system.

4 – iS ThERE Any CUSTOmER TyPE ThAT yOUR FlASh OFFERing iS nOT SUiTED TO?It is more a question for the customer’s priorities and workload requirements. While the benefits for a Flash storage system are aplenty – such as higher performance, lower power consumption and smaller physical footprint, there are two main considerations while adopting Flash storage which are price per GB as well as wear factor. Users need to understand their application needs and strike a balance between a faster performance and additional capacity. Every customer can be a user of flash as long as they have their math done right with respect to the above.

5 – WhAT’S yOUR TARgET mARkET in SOUTh ASiAEvery region in South Asia holds great potential. Businesses have a dire need for performance thus providing a great opportunity for flash solutions. Many of them need capacity growth as well. Thus, hybrid arrays generally offer a better option to achieve a good balance of performance and capacity. Every business need can practically be met by NetApp’s extensive range of data management and storage continuum – various flash solutions, hard drives with a variety of speed and capacity and different types of controllers. Thus an architect can build an appropriate solution for various price, performance and capacity requirements.

FlASh in A FlASh SERiES FROm nETAPP krIsHna aranI, ManaGInG dIrector of netaPP, asean and korea.

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1 – All FlASh OR hybRiD?Hybrid storage is used by companies who do that to combine the speed of flash with the cost efficiency of disk. But these legacy systems, with flash bolted on combine all of the weaknesses as well as the strengths of both, which makes them ultimately fall short.

That is because flash stores and serves data in a manner that is significantly different than disk. Read-activity is lightning fast, too many writes can wear out the medium, but this is where software becomes key to making enterprise flash work, as it not only delivers affordability, it makes flash more reliable at a hardware level. We know that it won’t be as simple as new broom sweeping out older technologies in an instant, but flash provides greater scalability and application consistency while consuming fewer data centre resources than anything possible with disk based storage.

2 – WhAT’S TRUly UniqUE AbOUT yOUR FlASh OFFERing?Flash is about to mainstream in the enterprise – and we are ready for that, compared to others. Our all-flash storage can transform an enterprise IT system through faster performance, efficiency, and streamlined IT and business operations. Our proof of concept eventually remove fears and gives prospects a tangible experience. Our systems allow to take advantage to changes without impact on business and without to refresh the traditional tech entirely. Customers can buy capacity when needed, and they benefit from lower density. It’s a paradigm shift, as our offer changes the commercial model of how storage has been consumed in the past. Companies with a traditional approach need to catch up and then turn their business model on ear.

In general, as flash is becoming standard, there’s a dramatic shift in disk to flash because of cost savings. We’re starting to see recognition from Gartner, IDC, etc. and all vendors are racing into the market.

3 – ARE iOPS EvERyThing? WhAT ElSE ShOUlD PEOPlE COnSiDER WhEn SElECTing FlASh STORAgE?The commonly accepted measure of performance for storage systems has long be IOPS. When testing a storage system, the standard practice has long been to use an industry standard benchmark tool such as IOmeter or vdbench to find out how many IOPS a system can deliver with different IO profiles

Unfortunately these IO profiles are usually based on outdated assumptions and my personal opinion is that they are not realistic.

Why is that? Because most of the profiles used in these benchmarks are based on small, 4KB or 8KB IOPS, whereas the average block size commonly observed on customer arrays in mixed workload environments is 32KB to 64KB.

The only real way to understand how fast an application will run on a given storage system is to run the application on this storage system.

4 – iS ThERE Any CUSTOmER TyPE ThAT yOUR FlASh OFFERing iS nOT SUiTED TO?No, it’s the opposite: we’ve seen broad appeal across the industry, which is a testament to the adaptability of the technology.

5 – WhAT’S yOUR TARgET mARkET in SOUTh ASiAWe are investing broadly into the ASEAN market covering Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and Vietnam.

FlASh in A FlASh SERiES FROm PURE STORAgE MIcHael cornwell, cto asIa PacIfIc and JaPan.

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1 – All FlASh OR hybRiD?Technically, each Tintri VMstore™ storage node physically contains both solid state drives (flash SSDs) as well as hard disk drives (HDDs). However, we use a 100% flash filesystem, with 100% of all metadata residing in flash at all times — we never have to perform an HDD IO to find out where a block resides. Further IO always goes to flash first, and we only move blocks to HDD that we know for certain are “cold” (we count the frequency of accesses and only move the least frequently accessed blocks to HDD). In other words, unlike traditional “hybrid” arrays that use flash as a cache, we assume all blocks need flash performance until we’ve measured otherwise.

2 – WhAT’S TRUly UniqUE AbOUT yOUR FlASh OFFERing?Each Tintri VMstore™ node allocates resources (including NVRAM, cpu, network bandwidth, HDD IOPS etc., not just flash) per virtual volume not per datastore/storage-container/LUN/volume/aggregate/raid-set. Tintri recognizes that modern IT virtualizes applications by default, and that IO workloads differ by virtual volume. A virtualized database has very different IO needs than a virtualized web server, for example. A database presents very different IO to a virtual volume used as a transaction log than it does to one containing indexes or tables. Tintri treats each virtual volume as the fundamental unit of management. Where traditional storage arrays allocate resources and assign policies per physical volume or LUN, Tintri does it per VM and per virtual volume.

This results in far fewer datastores to manage, and far more agile infrastructure for heavily.

3 – ARE iOPS EvERyThing? WhAT ElSE ShOUlD PEOPlE COnSiDER WhEn SElECTing FlASh STORAgE?Absolutely not. In fact, IOPS are no longer a very relevant metric for measuring storage performance with solid state storage devices. IOs come in various sizes: an individual 256 KB IO request does more “work” than, say, a 1 KB IO request. This fact was somewhat irrelevant during HDD era when the fastest hard disk drive technology (15K RPM fibre channel drives) could perform roughly 180 random IO requests per second regardless of the block sizes. We learned over the past several decades that the limiting was IOPS and the number of “spindles,” not

throughput (MB/s).

Solid state storage behaves differently. While an individual SSD can perform orders of magnitude more IOPS than an individual HDD, the number of IOPS roughly halves each time the block size is doubled. The limiting factor with SSDs is really throughput (MB/s) more than IOPS. Specifying IOPS to a solid state array without specifying the block size distribution is meaningless!

Tintri has stolen an idea from Microsoft and uses the concept of “normalized IOPS” (really a proxy for throughput) in our upcoming quality-of-service controls. Normalized IOPS are quantized to 8 KB. A single 1 KB IO is “counted” as one normalized IOP. An 8 KB transaction is also counted as one normalized IOP. But a single 32 KB IO, for example, counts as four normalized IOPS. This allows administrators to specify policies in terms of IOPS as desired, but actually throttle throughput as desired.

4 – iS ThERE Any CUSTOmER TyPE ThAT yOUR FlASh OFFERing iS nOT SUiTED TO?Tintri does not support physical workloads (applications running directly on physical servers rather than in a VM). We only support virtual machines and virtual volumes.

5 – WhAT’S yOUR TARgET mARkET in SOUTh ASiATintri currently has an established presence in Japan, Australia, and Singapore and intends to expand throughout all of Asia, including ANZ and ASEAN regions. Tintri is expanding globally, with significant operations in North America and EMEA as well as Asia.

FlASh in A FlASh SERiES FROm TinTRi rex walters, vP of tecHnoloGy.

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1 – All FlASh OR hybRiD?Flash is the answer. Hybrids are outdated intermediary steps but still have many problems, for example: you’re still stuck with slow spinning disk, which is still over-provisioned and under-performing; you now have an under-utilised flash tier in the hybrid; the hybrid needs to move data between tiers, often impacting batch jobs, and very seldom is the data movement between tiers real time; the administrator now has more complexity to manage – how much free capacity is needed in each tier not just for data storage, but to accommodate inter-tier data movement. With flash designed from the ground up, such as from Violin, there are only 2 tiers: pools with dedupe enabled, and pools with dedupe disabled, all in one compact low latency flash storage platform.

2 – WhAT’S TRUly UniqUE AbOUT yOUR FlASh OFFERing?No other vendors offer granular data reduction capability enabling storage admins to selectively optimise the capacity of data types that suit de-duplication while leaving critical applications for performance optimisation, on a LUN by LUN basis. Further, only Violin features all data services (replication, CDP etc) in the same footprint, without requiring external bolt-on components. Finally, Violin’s flash portfolio is managed from a single pane of glass, Symphony, the industry’s most elegant and simplest storage management interface.

3 – ARE iOPS EvERyThing? WhAT ElSE ShOUlD PEOPlE COnSiDER WhEn SElECTing FlASh STORAgE?This is a misconception, anybody can deliver 1M or 2M IOPS given enough datacentre space. Latency is the real king in the datacentre – sustained low latency for predictable application performance, no matter what the workload, on a compact 3RU flash unit delivering up to 220TB of capacity.

4 – iS ThERE Any CUSTOmER TyPE ThAT yOUR FlASh OFFERing iS nOT SUiTED TO?Archival, or cold data that can quite easily be stored on tape and infrequently accessed.

5 – WhAT’S yOUR TARgET mARkET in SOUTh ASiAViolin has been very successful in retail, ecommerce, manufacturing, telco, financial services and cloud providers. In South Asia, we believe users across these industries have a need for compact, low latency storage that enables their path to an efficient cloud that can slash software license costs by 80% or more, cut datacentre footprint/power/cooling by 90%, delivering faster business results at a price that compares very favourably with disk.

FlASh in A FlASh SERiES FROm viOlin MartIn coleMan, dIrector systeM enGIneerInG for asIa-PacIfIc.

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