Investing in flash storage can pay for itself in months, says Tegile

Coupled with advanced compression, savings in space, cooling, performance and bandwidth mean flash will soon pay for itself

Unlike with many technologies, most people find it had to work up much enthusiasm for storage infrastructure, and yet modern storage devices and their accompanying software can make huge differences to the way that data centres operate, the space they take up, the power they use and ultimately the bottom line.

Speaking at Computing's Data Centre Summit today, Paul Clarke, regional sales manager at flash storage vendor Tegile Systems, said he realised that to most of the audience storage is a "necessary evil". However, he said there are many benefits to investing in new generation, high I/O storage infrastructure, especially when it is accompanied by software that enables extreme levels of compression.

His company's systems, he claimed, can reduce data volumes by up to 95 per cent using techniques that drastically reduce the size of metadata. He quoted one customer case study in which more than 16TB of data was reduced to a volume of just 1.69TB after compression.

Such techniques really come into their own when it comes to replication, he said. Not only does the data require far less space on disk in the primary and replicated environments, but WAN bandwidth requirements are also reduced, overall systems performance improves, and software licensing costs may also be decreased.

Clarke claimed the costs of investment in advanced storage infrastructure can often be recouped in a matter of months, as a result of efficiency savings it enables.

For example, the airline Aer Lingus recovered the cost of its investments in 13 months, Clarke said, by reducing the space required in its Tier-1 colocated data centre from four racks to one including compute. File transfer performance was also improved markedly.

There are operational benefits too: "All of this is relevant to disaster recovery and business continuity," Clarke explained. "It's about how quick you get that data back. How you can meet your restore time objectives."

In terms of disaster recovery, Tegile's technology creates zero-size pointer-based snapshots from which data can be restored instantaneously on a many-to-one or one-to-many basis. It can also utilise the cloud via a plugin into Amazon services and other public and also private clouds. While Tegile is not unique in this regard, Clarke said its ability to mix all-flash and hybrid arrays is unusual.

"One thing we do that's different from other people is we don't only do all-flash arrays we also do flash-based hybrid arrays. A site that might require all-flash performance on the main site might be better off with a hybrid array on the recovery site, because it's cheaper," he said.

Answering a question from the audience about the reliability of flash, Clarke said that thanks to analytics software enterprise-grade flash is now every bit as reliable as spinning disk if not more so, and a built-in 30 percent buffer means that failures, when they do occur, are flagged up a long time in advance and can thus be easily managed.

Tegile Systems were a sponsor of the Data Centre and Infrastructure Summit