Hybrid storage arrays versus all-flash: will disks hold their own? In the early days of smartphones, some had hard disks in them – tiny devices storing a gigabyte or two on a single one-inch (or smaller) disk platter. This was mainly because flash was expensive and untrusted, whereas people knew where they were with hard disks. We all know how it turned out, though. Flash memory grew cheaper …
When you buy a new car, you balance your budget against features an performance, but if I offered you a BMW for the price of a budget family car, which would you buy? There wouldn't be many people saying it's too fast!
That's where we are going with SSD. Next year, at some point, we'll see SDD get as cheap as the cheapest hard drive. With lifetimes well beyond any realistic wear-out, and better reliability, would you buy another hard drive in 2017? You'd be nuts...or you'd swallowed all that FUD hook, line and sinker.
Reality is that we are already making a dumb comparison. SSD are cheaper today than "enterprise" hard drives., and come in much larger capacities. The enterprise HDD is already dead!
Hmm, some were seeing the end of tape with the introduction of HDDs.........
I dont doubt that HDDs will be pushed further and further down the pecking order but I just cant see SSD/Flash become as dense and as cost effective per gb against HDDs for some time and certainly not in two year's time.
For workloads other than the very top tier where all flash makes sense and can be justified, the hybrid players such as Nimble have got the right balance, for now, where they can give massive performance but not at the same high cost as the all flash players. The best of both worlds, if you like.
It's not disks we're seeing the end of, it's specifically enterprise SAS disks. There's storage vendors already seeing their 15k RPM hard drive sales wither to nothing, replaced by SSDs - but they're still selling fat SATA drives (and yes, tape libraries) behind that.
As noted in the article, the decision of flash v hybrid is all about the workload performance requirements. Users need to characterize the I/O profiles of their installed production workloads, create tests that accurately represent them and then run them against the various hybrid or all flash array products. This is where companies like Load Dynamix add value. They provide workload modeling and load generation products that simplify and standardize the storage performance evaluation process.
Unless you are reading this thread on a CRT and thus probably be working in a very extraordinary environment, you should get familiar with the idea that 5 years from now, most of your data will be stored on solid state or tape but no longer an expensive micro mechanic devices called hard drives.
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