Did you know that most all-flash arrays don’t deliver anything close to the performance potential of the drives installed in them? Underachieving all-flash arrays (UAFA?) are the result of vendors taking a shortcut to the market. They use inefficient open-source file systems and code for the foundation of their storage solutions. The problem is that, like most shortcuts, underachieving vendors find themselves ill-prepared to take advantage of recent advancements in technology. The result is they force their customers to buy high-end server hardware to hide their shortcomings.
What is an Underachieving All-Flash Array?
An underachieving all-flash array is one that doesn’t deliver on the full potential of each drive installed in the system. My colleague, Gal Turchinski, wrote a white paper discussing the importance of maximum drive performance and how the data center can benefit if the storage system delivers it. The reason underachieving all-flash arrays exist is because of inefficient storage software. Another colleague of mine, Ittai Doron, recently wrote a blog detailing the ROI improvements of efficient storage software like StorONE’s S1 Enterprise Storage Platform.
Creating an Overachieving All-Flash Array
The opposite of underachieving all-flash arrays are ones that overachieve. This type of all-flash array must utilize very efficient storage software, written from the ground up, not rely on open-source code and rethinking conventional algorithms. These arrays deliver 85% or more of the maximum drive performance of the system. What makes them overachieving is their ability to provide this maximum drive performance while using minimal server hardware and storage interconnects. They also deliver this high-performance without compromising enterprise storage features or data integrity. Creating an overachieving flash array is at the heart of what StorONE is all about.
The Underachieving All-Flash Array Conundrum
Underachieving all-flash arrays typically only deliver 20% of the system’s total performance potential (raw performance of each drive x number of drives). The underachieving all-flash array requires the latest servers, maximum memory, and most advanced networking to deliver even such mediocre results. The excess in hardware keeps storage hardware expensive. As StorONE CEO Gal Naor and I recently discussed in our webinar, “Learn the TRUth about Enterprise Storage Prices,” these inefficiencies are also why vendors hide their pricing.
The Overachieving All-Flash Array Advantage
Overachieving all-flash arrays, unlike underachieving all-flash arrays, offer 85% of the system’s total performance potential while using midrange servers to host the software. It all comes down to developing efficient storage software. As a result, a vendor like StorONE is proud to show its pricing instead of hiding it. You can go to our TRUprice site, configure a system that meets your needs, and see the price, without registration!
An overachieving all-flash array armed with efficient storage software like StorONE’s S1 means that a twelve drive AFA can deliver more than 500k IOPS, and a 24 drive AFA can deliver almost 1 million IOPS. Again, these configurations use cost-effective midrange servers and only 128GBs of RAM. Thanks to the efficiency of the S1 Enterprise Storage Platform, solutions powered by StorONE deliver the lowest $ per IOPS and answer all the concerns of the storage price check.
The ROI of Cost-Effective Performance
As Gal Turchinski mentions in his white paper, affordable access to plentiful IOPS means you can leverage your storage infrastructure to reduce costs elsewhere in the organization. Unlike underachieving all-flash arrays, an overachieving all-flash array enables you to do things like scale databases further, and maximize per-core licensing. You can also increase virtual machine density by a tenfold, eliminating the need to buy additional physical servers for years. S1 is not limited to block use cases though, for example, you can service high-performance NFS and user home directories via SMB. Most importantly, all of these use cases, thanks in part to excess in performance, are serviceable from a single storage system. As a result, an overachieving all-flash array also lowers operational expenses. It enables IT to become Storage Heroes.
Next Steps:
Set up a personalized demo
Download our white paper to learn how efficient storage software can reduce backup infrastructure costs
Download our white paper on the value of Maximum Drive Performance
Watch the below webinar with StorONE CEO Gal Naor and CMO George Crump as they discuss how we leverage our efficient storage software to develop TRUprice.
