Stop the revolution! Flash set to displace the spinning disk

A shake-up in the storage market is happening - ignore it and get left behind. Computing talks to Dan Leary of Nimble Storage to find out how storage is changing

When technology hits an inflection point, sudden and fast change is guaranteed, which inevitably means that organisations that fail to move quickly enough will get left behind. The only question is over when that shift occurs - an answer that is usually dictated by price.

And such a revolution is happening in storage now, where solid-state disks (SSDs) are poised to supplant mechanical spinning disk drives after years of being regarded as a luxury item, not just in the mainstream computer market, but in the data centre and across the storage-area network, too.

This means that not only is the world of storage being turned upside down, but organisations that have been quick to adopt new storage architectures that make the most of the technology are benefiting at the expense of more slovenly movers.

But according to Dan Leary, vice president of marketing at fast-growing storage system vendor Nimble, it's about more than just swapping out spinning disks and replacing them with SSDs, or flash storage.

"SSDs alone can provide a performance kick, but the real driver of productivity that can also cut costs and improve productivity is the management software, which can automate many laborious tasks," says Leary.

InfoSight is Nimble's cloud-based management software, which monitors and analyses the usage of Nimble storage arrays and can enable IT administrators to accurately forecast and manage future needs.

In other words, it's the application of machine learning or predictive analytics to storage management. For example, InfoSight can accurately gauge when an organisation needs to add more capacity, and highlight emerging bottlenecks before they become a problem.

InfoSight is a part of the Nimble Adaptive Flash platform.

"At the heart of our offerings is the Adaptive Flash platform. It enables our customers to be able to support hundreds to thousands of different kinds of applications and workloads, all within a single storage array or platform.

"What happened previously is that organisations needed to put in multiple different storage silos, depending on whether an application required a lot of capacity or high performance," says Leary.

Managing increasingly heterogeneous storage environments, though, is a challenge in itself, and also contributes to data silos. "There's a huge amount of cost and complexity associated with managing all of these separate silos... often, they even need to be managed with different management tools," says Leary.

The Adaptive Flash platform, in contrast, is able to serve all these different needs by automatically managing disparate applications and workloads. "At the heart of its software, the CASL architecture enables customers to set up the 'personality' for the storage that matches its needs. For example, all-flash arrays. They tend to be very fast with low latency and predictable, fast performance.

"However, all-flash arrays are very expensive and, therefore, limited to only a very small subset of the applications that really need it. Nimble's software enables IT administrators simply press a button if they want to run an application in an all-flash mode to get that consistent level of high performance," says Leary.

Applications requiring a balance of performance and capacity, though, can utilise the auto-flash mode, but with the data ultimately backed to lower-cost (and slower) storage technology.

The Adaptive Flash platform, adds Leary, is the only storage platform capable of optimising in terms of performance, capacity, data protection, and reliability, within a dramatically smaller footprint, saving data centre space too. Total cost of ownership, taking into account power, rack space and cooling requirements, is therefore between one-fifth and one-third of rivals, claims Leary.

"Nimble Storage was founded nearly eight years ago, and the premise of our founders - who have decades of experience in the storage industry - was that the whole data storage industry was about to go through a huge transformation as a result of major technology disruptions. And the biggest of those is, of course, the advent of flash or SSDs.

"They have brought in this completely new perspective of a media that's 100 times faster than the spinning disk that has been the foundation of the storage industry for decades. What we recognised, though, is that flash alone was not going to solve all of these problems.

"We set out to build a very different, new storage architecture that could take advantage of the best capabilities of flash - all of the performance - but also leverage the complimentary capabilities of disk, but in a new way.

"The result is that we have been able to build systems that are dramatically more efficient than anything else out there right now," says Leary.

Nimble Storage is a Gold Sponsor of Computing's Data Centre and Infrastructure Summit 2015 on Wednesday 23^rd September.

Attendance is FREE for qualifying end users. To peruse the agenda and to register, please click here.