Although flash technology has been around for some time, it is only now that organizations are really investigating the limitless possibilities of this technological advance. Is ‘limitless possibilities’ an overstatement? Not if I listen to what our customers and prospects are planning to do with flash arrays in their storage infrastructure. And with new technological advances, the future looks very bright for flash indeed.

We recently hosted a lunch & learn session at one of our Belgian customers who implemented the EMC XtremIO all-flash array last year for a VDI project. Without giving away too much, the company in question saw TCO savings of 30 per cent, average storage response time reductions from 7-9 ms to under one ms and an acceleration of VDI deployment from 90 minutes to just 10 minutes. And all of this came without a decrease in end-user experience.

In discussions with the participants at this session, it became clear they all have interesting business cases where flash will help them bring benefits to the business users. While VDI is probably the application of flash that comes to mind first, this is by no means the only use case. Any IOPS and latency-sensitive block storage application, server virtualization, databases and analytics, agile data management,… they all scream for the use of flash technology. Users expect nothing less than consistently high performance for very high speed transaction processing tasks.

EMC has invested heavily in making flash a key element in our storage strategy, both by internal development and by making smart acquisitions, like XtremIO We have shipped over 145 PB of flash storage, and are becoming the de facto standard for flash technology at many customers, regardless of their size and budgets. Who would say ‘no’ to a 30 per cent increase in performance?

To allow our customers to further boost their workloads, we also acquired flash storage start-up DSSD last month. Founded by a number of highly qualified storage veterans, this company is developing flash arrays that will not use Fibre Channel, InfiniBand or Ethernet links, but will allow access to data over direct PCI-Express links. This opens now possibilities to boost workloads. There’s a lot of computer-intensive applications around, like in-memory processing, big data or analytics that require getting data out of storage and into memory as quickly as possible. We all know the difference between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ storage in the storage hierarchy but, in fact, here we are introducing the notion of ‘ultra-hot’ storage. And let me assure you, the future of flash is ultra-hot too…

About the author
Arnaud Bacros is Country Manager of EMC Belux.