Pure says two of the four tiers of storage are set to disappear Pure Storage is brutally flogging its FlashArray technology, driving it faster and faster. The pace of development in flash arrays is picking up with EMC and NetApp get involved, and startups have to hustle and bustle to stay ahead. Pure's perception of the enterprise data centre networked storage market is that we are moving …
A flash vendor suggesting disk will become less relevant? Wow. Didn't expect that.
When flash is cheaper per TB than disk then this will be true.
When the total cost of flash is less than tape, then tape will no longer be relevant.
All of this is a long way off, if it ever happens.
And that's the worst graph I've seen for a while. It's oddly linear, and there are no units on the X axis, rendering it completely useless.
These guys probably have a decent product, but if they sell it like this the only people who'll buy it are those who fall for the marketing crap. Which is probably quite a lot of people, admittedly.
Don't Pure use consumer grade MLC ?
There's no way I'm putting enterprise apps on consumer based crap, no matter what software surrounds it - way too much risk for me.
Also, claiming the death of HDDs is almost childish. It's well known that there's not enough fabrication plants in existence to produce enough flash for Tier 1 & 2 - and with no new plants being built, it's impossible for flash to take over the HDD future installs.
Let me know when you have a viable alternative to backing up the 900Tb I have to manage.
Let me know when it's proof against fire, or j.random Luser typing in "rm -f /" and wanting all her data back 6 weeks later or (if removable) being dropped on the floor.
Let me know when the costs of this solution are even close to that of a good tape based solution.
Replication and online backups ahve their place. Offline backup is there for a reason and failure to have it has put more than one company out of business following a disaster.
>With HDDs being cheap and online storage available for almost nothing, there are few reasons for anyone to use tape any more.
A yes, that magical online storage which doesn't need hard drives or any other storage medium to actually hold the data.
Yes, HDDs are cheap and they continue to get cheaper (ignoring the flood for now). Tapes are getting cheaper too. It's a moving target.
You're right though, there are few reasons for anyone to continue to use tape. One of those few reasons is it continues to be cheap and reliable, which is strangely quite significant for most businesses.
How many years have we been hearing that 'tape is dead' yet it's still going relatively strong. All these newer, faster tiers don't replace anything, they just give more choice and flexibility. There will be storage scenarios that need tape, there will be storage scenarios that need decent performance and decent capacity, and there will be storage requirements that just need blistering fast. And most people have all 3, and more. Flash doesn't replace disk or tape as such, it just means that for apps that might have needed huge numbers of spindles and wasted a shed load of capacity as a result, there is now a better way! The clever vendors are the ones who will offer all these choices as seamlessly as possible. The HP approach of having one enterprise featured array that can offer pure flash, hybrid, and SAS is a good one. The same addressable market for EMC is covered by about 5 different arrays! Same for most vendors, to be honest.
Flash is not going to displace spinning rust, which is not going to displace tape any time soon. It's just another memory/cache/storage tier.
SRAM: fast but expensive.
DRAM : cheaper, larger, slower.
(non-volatile)
Flash: cheaper, larger, slower.
Disk: cheaper, larger, slower. Good for near-line storage. Not designed or suitable for archival.
Tape: cheaper, larger, Very high latency. Good for archival.
Flash has largely displaced high-rpm disks, and small hard drives, but otherwise each tier still has a solid place in systems and the market.
This is unlikely to change until new technologies emerge, such as holographic storage or memristors.
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