Violin Memory 2015 Predictions

 2015 Predictions by Eric Herzog, CMO and SVP alliances, Violin Memory, after being SVP, marketing and communications at EMC

As the global economy improves and businesses look at how they control costs and leverage efficiencies in their storage environment, flash storage has already begun to replace traditional enterprise storage in data centre environments flash storage has a foothold in the market that will continue to grow through clear ROI and proven cost reductions in existing operations, while flash storage acquisition costs have come into parity with high-end and upper mid-range traditional enterprise storage arrays (HDD-based and hybrid-based).

Numerous examples exist of companies realising new business and revenue development when better access to business data enables them to make informed decisions and serve their customers better flash storage has also been tied to money saved in overall data centre costs with businesses buying fewer physical servers: equating to fewer software licences and lower overall costs for virtualisation, IT manpower and environmental costs, such as power and cooling, rack, and floor space.

The adoption of flash storage grew dramatically in both 2014 and 2013
and will be accelerated even faster in 2015:

1. Flash will become primary storage in 2015
The cost of all-flash arrays is already on a par with traditional enterprise HDD-based and hybrid-based storage systems. Some all-flash array storage vendors, like Violin, have added significant data services to their flash solutions in 2014 – expanding from a performance-at-all-cost niche into the storage mainstream where reliability, performance, manageability, scale, and enterprise data services are givens. As more storage decision makers recognise these data services, as well as powerful, granular management tools, and the TCO and ROI benefits of all-flash arrays, the use cases for flash will rapidly expand into mainstream enterprise-wide productivity applications. All-flash arrays will become the de facto standard for general purpose primary storage workloads.

2. Data centre consolidation is accelerating
As CIOs and data centre managers become more familiar with the uses and benefits of all flash arrays as primary storage, they will come to realise they don’t need football-field-sized data centres to support current operations. Flash vendors routinely claim 10x savings in footprint and HVAC costs at the same time they claim 10x improvements in application performance for the end-users dependent on those data centres. Even if only half of those claims are true, all flash arrays, especially those purpose-built implementations built on flexible, powerful architectures, have the ability to save millions in data centre costs while improving the end user experience.

3. Virtualisation is finally real
Solving the storage bottleneck in a virtualised data centre has been the holy grail of IT. VMs blenderise I/Os into randomness, and random I/O performance has been the Achilles Heel of HDD-based storage arrays for over 50 years. Flash storage, with its sub 500 microsecond latencies and standard data reductions services are game changers for server and desktop virtualisation both flash storage can handle most current VM densities and even drive higher VM consolidation before saturating. And flash-based storage can drive persistent VDI numbers into the thousands, all with no loss of agility and mobility. The combination of flash performance built on ground up design and integrated hardware/software architectures with widely available, granular data reduction technologies – deduplication and compression – will be the new standard for virtual infrastructures in 2015 and beyond.

4. More data will be more valuable
We haven’t seen the full bloom of social media or the social enterprise yet. Companies are just learning how to market and sell to customers based on the affinities and localities that can be extracted from smart phone and social media usage patterns. As more of this data is collected and mined, the smart companies will find advantage and the rest will get crushed. In order to collect, store and analyse unstructured data from disparate devices, storage with the capacity, density, performance and reliability of all flash arrays will be critical. All flash arrays built of complete, well-thought-out, purpose built architectures will become the cornerstone for competitive companies and the demise of all others. And this is before the Internet of Things accelerates data growth by another order of magnitude. But that’s a prediction for 2016 …