By now, you probably know the big benefits of flash storage and solid state drives – faster, more reliable performance and quicker access to important data. But maybe your organization thinks it doesn’t really need that extra performance. Things are probably rolling along just fine in your old server closet. Day to day operations are completed on time, and your equipment still functions properly. Unfortunately, that might not be enough.
Spinning disk, or hard disk drives, have very near reached the pinnacle of performance, lagging far behind the pace of Moore’s law. While HDDs still have their place in the data center, flash storage is the new standard for performance – and as time goes on – capacity. This shift in data center storage media type isn’t a fad, or a flash in the pan, but rather a natural (and overdue) progression of storage technology. In years past, flash media has been prohibitively expensive, but that’s no longer the case. The proliferation of flash storage based consumer devices, together with rapid and substantial investment from manufacturers, has pretty much eliminated the cost discrepancy between flash and spinning disk.
Not to mention, everyone is quickly growing accustomed to having instant access to the information they need, from instant streaming of television shows or movies to account updates from their bank, and everything in between. If your organization begins to lag behind in responsiveness – even by just a few seconds – your users could grow frustrated.
Don’t wait for that to happen. With cost on parity – and performance exponentially greater – flash storage is the media to consider first when upgrading and replacing your storage arrays. For more information on why flash storage could be the right fit for your data center, take a listen to our recent podcast with Paige Clapper, ISS Solutions Architect at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
