According to the data analysis gathered by Gartner, for the storage industry in 2017, the overall market volume of all-flash storage increased by 36%, reaching US$6.3 billion, whereas the procurement price continued to decline by at least 40% in the past 18 months.
By Gartner
Market Overview and Forecast
In response to increasing competition among different brands, vendors launched software packaging, performance, and reliability commitments, further emphasizing the value of all-flash storage in data centers. It is predicted that 50% of all traditional disk storage in data centers will be replaced by all-flash storage by 2020.
The application of NVMe and 3D XPoint will help improve the all-flash storage performance by ten folds with a doubled density and 50% lower unit capacity price in the next year, reducing the costs of all-flash storage and making it more accessible than ever before.
Analysis
Most storage vendors capitalize on enhanced product functions to compete with each other. Driven by the advancements in different technologies, the storage infrastructure will be fundamentally different in the future. Solid-state Disks (SSDs) and all-flash storage are transformational technologies that increase performance and storage utilization by up to two orders of magnitude.
SSDs and all-flash storage delivers high performance, low cost, and high reliability, which are regarded as unobtainable in traditional storage scenarios. Many commonly accepted rules will be no longer applicable. For example, the previous unwritten requirements such as matching storage performance, application performance, and service importance to maximize resource utilization are no longer major issues because all-flash storage data centers provide a lower TCO than traditional disk storage. All-flash storage helps customers save on O&M costs while improving administration productivity and infrastructure efficiency thanks to its data reduction mechanism. This results in a flat storage infrastructure with only one storage tier, consisting of SSDs.
Competition and progress in all-flash storage has created a level of maturity, reliability, and cost-effectiveness that exceeds hybrid disk arrays in all characteristics except raw capacity, providing data centers with higher agility and service capability.
- Reliability Comparison
The advanced disk technologies have prolonged the life cycle of traditional disk storage from 3 years to 5 years, but it is difficult to improve on that length. Alternatively, the reliability of all-flash storage extends the storage life cycle to 7 years or even longer, which is why many enterprises are leading towards all-flash for their storage needs.
- TCO Comparison
Take an American medical analysis organization as an example. It replaced its hybrid storage with all-flash storage at 3.6:1 data reduction ratio. The all-flash storage helped decrease the procurement cost and operational cost by 75% and 83.5% respectively.
Impacts and Recommendations
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The post Gartner: Moving Toward the All-Flash Storage Data Centers appeared first on Huawei Enterprise Blog.
Source: Huawei Enterprise Blog
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