All-Flash has been highlighted as a specific market segment within the storage industry. Initially this was probably justified because of the number of new start-ups that were developing for the market. With all of the major storage vendors either amending or acquiring technology, is there really a justification for having a separate market segment for all-flash or should we flip this on its head and say all-flash is the norm and the rest are legacy arrays?
In this podcast, recorded on 24 October 2016, we talk with Bob Madaio, VP Infrastructure Solutions at Hitachi Data Systems. We discuss market evolution, architecture, features, performance, TCO, analysts and futures. Bob even manages to get a plug in for Hitachi’s most recent release of all-flash VSP!
- Elapsed Time: 00:44:22
- SFW: Yes
Timeline
- 00:00:00 – Introductions
- 00:01:04 – All-flash as a market segment – should we have a separate market segment
- 00:01:58 – Background – EMC SLC in DMX – 2008. Violin 1010, Pure Storage, XtremIO, Kaminario. Hitachi FMD.
- 00:03:03 – Hitachi FMD on VSP – Flash Modules – 2012. Hitachi SLCs 2009. TMS – for 25 years?
- 00:04:50 – All flash versions of hybrid products – Tegile, Tintri and the addition of features.
- 00:05:35 – Discussion on architecture. Is it still important? Were flash devices in traditional arrays acceptable? Speed of flash caused problems without architecting. 2012, Hitachi rewrote code.
- 00:07:00 – Architecture options – scale-up versus scale-out, is one better than another?
- 00:08:20 – Does the media make a market? (background)
- 00:09:40 – Have media improvements allowed vendors to put flash into traditional products?
- 00:11:25 – Consumer-grade flash for enterprise grade appliances.
- 00:12:40 – Hitachi, dedicated FMD and now using commodity devices.
- 00:15:20 – Is intelligent media a good idea when trying to stay competitive?
- 00:16:00 – Hitachi 14TB FMD – the challenge of Hitachi engineering keeping up
- 00:16:40 – Features – do we have parity of features – real or data sheet level? The Vendor Olympics (background)
- 00:18:00 – Could all of the features be in the application and storage just do storage efficiency?
- 00:20:00 – Synchronous replication – does it cause a problem with flash? Active/Active is popular.
- 00:21:30 – All-flash comparisons – customers love their data sheets!
- 00:22:46 – Hitachi announces de-duplication for VSP!
- 00:24:00 – Performance and testing – do we need new benchmarks? (background)
- 00:26:25 – Nanoseconds or microseconds? D’oh!
- 00:27:55 – How does this affect the business? Business benefits from implementing flash – but what TCO should we use?
- 00:30:00 – Robots to do storage provisioning.
- 00:30:30 – Power, cooling and data centre space savings – is this a valid argument?
- 00:33:30 – Band aids to fix poorly performing applications.
- 00:34:30 – All-flash rocket ships (or dragsters) – everybody has one.
- 00:35:50 – Magic quadrangles and supernatural polygons – how useful are analysts? (background)
- 00:37:00 – Creating a market to make the accounting easier – excluding vendors to make things simple.
- 00:39:50 – Amazon Web Services – an unrecognised all-flash vendor?
- 00:40:30 – Futures – what can we expect? DSSD, Mangstor, E8 – high-performance platforms. (background)
- 00:42:10 – Will we see tiered flash – vendors already doing it.
- 00:43:20 – Wrap up!
Further Reading
- Follow Bob on Twitter – https://twitter.com/bmadaio
- Hitachi Data Systems Community Forum (link)
- VSP announcements – data efficiency and QoS (link)
- Hitachi FMDs (link)
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