Flash Memory Influence in Data Center Industry
CIOReview Team | Tuesday, 02 June 2015, 13:13 IST
The computing capabilities of the processors have scaled many-fold over the last decade. The capacity and cost of the storage devices have rocketed but the performance of hard drives has seen no major improvement. According to Intel, during the time period of 1996 to 2010, the CPU performance increased by 175 times but the hard drive performance has meagerly improved by 30 percent that comes to about 1.3 times the earlier. The usage of hard drives in data centers that have used the storage space inadequately but consumed enormous power to keep the disks running has proven to be inefficient. Increase in randomization of Input/Output (I/O) has further aggravated the storage management concerns. Though solutions such as flash memory have been less prevalent in enterprise level, they have much more capabilities that can be leveraged to suffice the current storage management woes in the data centers. Flash memory is fast and consumes less power compared to the mechanical disk drives. But the unreliable flash form factor weighs it down. Companies such as ‘Pure Storage’ have come up with flash memory technologies and one of their products, FlashArray that works on Purity Operating Environment. Its features address the key concern that is stopping flash memory from being used at the enterprise level. The FlashArray provides 10 times faster performance on both Input Output Per Second (IOPS) and latency, 10 times more efficient in power, space and cooling. The FlashArray is a redundant enterprise array in reliability terms that has self-healing mechanisms in times of media failures. It supports fiber optical channels and can scale upto 100s of terabytes. The company Pure Storage that manufactures FlashArray storage solution has experienced vast improvements in the year 2013 in its flash memory business and is confident about its prospects with the ever evolving technological landscape.
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