
Like I was saying.
Rotating drives won't survive the recession.
OCZ has announced a 16-terrabyte server flash-card whopper that supports vMotion and – spec-wise – tosses EMC's puny 300GB Lightning card out of the pram. OCZ's announcement of the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ is anorexic, detail-wise, but here's the little we've gleaned from it and a couple of other outlets: Capacity ranges from …
At the end of the day, looking at the actual data in use at the block and segment level... Does it really matter that you have 500GB, 1TB, or 16TB? No it does not. Only small tidbits of data need caching solutions from a majority view of the market. Sure there is a need in very select few datasets and customers that may need a large high IOP solution, but boasting about 16TB means nothing to the educated storage admin.
It's proper data management, and granular tiering solutions that are needed. The hardware is already here, we need the software to catch up.
Certainly within the database space IOPS at low latency are more and more important, and for typical SAN based disk archiecture it costs more and more because of the inherently poor latency performance of a random workload on a 15Krpm drive.
Flash hooked into PCIe is the way to go, resilience through software block replication to remote servers.
Role on a nother 5 years!
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