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The beached whale of storage thrashes on the all flash array shoreline

We all know spinning rust is dead. Get on with it already

Storagebod This should be an interesting year for the industry with the mergers, takeovers and companies simply thrashing around trying to reinvent themselves.

The recent announcements from companies large and small around all flash arrays has temporarily pricked me awake. Hopefully, at some point soon, the All Flash Array Announcement will no longer be a thing, it’ll just be another array announcement.

Flash will eventually subsume rotational rust as the primary storage medium of choice for all workloads. Well, until the next big thing comes along. Opinion as to when this will happen does vary between pundits and purveyors, but it is undoubtedly going to happen.

That time is not here, though, and perhaps it is still worth considering the best use of our storage capacity and how to get the most from it. It seems that some vendors don’t really want to help us poor customers in this space.

If you ship an AFA variant of an existing array and you either add new features that aren’t supported on the existing variant across all tiers of storage, be it flash or rotational rust or vice versa, I want good architectural reasons as to why you can’t do so.

Compression, for example, works very well on both traditional disk and flash; in-line deduplication is harder, so you might get a pass on the latter but not the former. If you want to try and convince me that your expensive flash tier is actually as cheap as the traditional tier you also ship, you are going to have work extra hard to do so when competing with vendors who can actually enable features across all of their tiers.

I shall leave it to the reader’s imagination as to which vendor might be attempting to play this game.

Also, apart from life still being somewhat stressful, I am amusing myself by trying to get my home office perfectly set up. I might even put up pictures once I have done so. ®

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