Flash arrays to spark real-time data market

Moore's Law comes to storage-ville

Inexpensive high-density Flash storage arrays will democratise the use of real-time and mobile data in business, says one of the pioneers of the technology.

Dr Donald Basile, chief executive of Violin Memory, is currently promoting his company’s latest Toshiba-based 40TB Flash memory array squeezed into a 3U package.

Compared with conventional magnetic spinning disks, devices like the Violin 3140 can operate at between 10 and 100 times the speed, take up less than a fifth of the space and consume only a tenth of the power. This makes them the only viable storage medium for dealing with real-time data for location-based applications and to deal with the flood of data from intelligent connected machines (also known as “the internet of things”), claims Basile.

“There are currently only a small number of infrastructures – at firms like Google and Amazon – that can handle real-time data on any scale, and they have spent millions of dollars building those networks,” Basile told Computing. “But using [Flash arrays] enterprises can use real-time data with packaged applications.”

Spinning discs have not changed in fundamental design for over a decade and have begun to hit the physical limits of their operation as the speed of the disks approaches the speed of sound. The widespread use of Flash arrays, Basile said, will restore the balance of Moore’s Law between microprocessor development and storage development. Moore's Law means a device's performance doubles every 18 months.

Applications, such as location-based marketing, will never become widespread without the uptake of underlying Flash array storage, he claimed.

“With location-based services you have a second or even a fraction of a second to deliver the data to a mobile device.”

John Vaines, managing director of Diamond Point which sells Violin products in the UK, says the products can be integrated into arrays of more than 500TB in one rack and can be managed through conventional network and storage management tools.

Basile says Violin currently has three categories of customer: ISPs building cloud service infrastructures, the US Federal Government (largely for real-time signals processing), and financial institutions. But he says anyone with a large database application is a potential customer.

“There’s no need to configure the database for speed of access any more because the whole thing is in memory,” says Basile. “The valuable brains that used to do that sort of thing can be deployed doing something more valuable for the organisation.”

Pricing has always been an issue when it comes to solid-state storage versus spinning disk. Violin’s arrays are priced at “below $16/GB” and, according to Vaines, are comparable with hard disk storage when usable capacity is taken into account.