The history of data storage ranging from our devices to our data centers amounts to a years’ long progression of bigger, faster, and over time, cheaper.
Within the enterprise data center, today’s state of the art is the All-Flash Array, which depends upon non-volatile Flash storage to provide high performance and durability, as compared to the spinning disk technology that preceded it.
Hot, Warm, and Cold Data
Until recently, however, Flash arrays were decidedly more expensive than hard drives, prompting enterprises to implement a mix of different storage technologies for different purposes.
At the high end, Flash supports high performance computing (HPC) and certain mission-critical tasks that require real-time processing of data – what we call ‘hot data.’ For top performance, hot data require expensive network protocols like InfiniBand or similarly costly storage-area networks (SANs) that depend upon Fibre Channel networking technology.
In the middle are ‘warm data’ on hard drives that leverage earlier spinning disk technology. Due to their moving parts, such disks wear out with annoying frequency. In larger data centers, replacing them can be a full-time job.
Furthermore, it takes a moment for a such a disk to start spinning – on the order of milliseconds. Milliseconds don’t sound like a lot, but Flash ‘spins’ up (in quotes since no spinning is involved) in microseconds – a thousand-times improvement in latency.
And then there are ‘cold data,’ typically on tape. Yes, the magnetic tape familiar from quaint movies of 1960s data centers – with more advanced technology to be sure, but still tape. Tape is really not good for anything but backup purposes, but it’s still a favorite technology because of its extraordinarily low media cost.
The problem with tape – or any backup technology, for that matter – is that all of its business value depends upon the ability to recover data from the backup. Given that tape wears out over time, the only way to make sure all the data are recoverable is to try to recover them.
Just one problem: most enterprises have so much information backed up on tape that making sure all of it is recoverable is a fools’ errand. Instead, they perform random tests, maintain duplicate backups for some information (thus increasing costs), and cross their fingers about the rest.
Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2018/05/29/what-if-all-data-were-hot-data-flash-storage-hits-two-inflection-points/.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Pure Storage is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Pure Storage covered Jason Bloomberg’s expenses at Pure Accelerate, a standard industry practice. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.
