All-flash storage will make a big difference in the way data is kept, says Bill McGloin, the storage expert and Chief Technologist at major reseller and integrator Computacenter who has been working in data and storage for years. He recounts how he many waves of core strategy thinking among customers has gone from “store everything” to “control the data” to “how do we use this stuff”.
On top of this, there has been the rise of issues like compliance an legislative requirements, whch also impact the decisions customers make. But his time might be different. “The next phase offers value in real-time working for the first time” Computacenter has been working on this disruptive phase for the last two years, moving from what might be termed classic storage thinking to the interpretation of data. And this will be very much in demand by customers, he thinks.
The move into analytics and data has meant we have retrained a lot of people, and looked at our internal skills. Customers know about the features of storage but need to understand how data storage can be used to solve problems and understand the benefits.
New apps and new versions of old apps are being designed to take advantage of flash and the dramatic increase in I/O operations per second (IOPs); the data world is a bit different when the systems can give you more than 10m IOPs.
Not that this change will be overnight – in 2015 some 80% of storage was disk-based or hybrid, and this will drop to 60% in the next few years. The main driver may not be so much the performance as the savings in power and air conditioning made possible by the move away from rotating drives. “This will be true especially in the City of London, where power is limited.”
So Computacenter will move to a flash-first policy for customers, expecting it to cover a high percentage of their requirements. This will be enhanced as developers realise the change and incorporate the use of flash into their apps. “There is pent-up demand here,” he says, having talked to partners SAS and Oracle. The target will be live data analysis and working, with the EMC DSSD becoming the reference storage device, though its use may still stay in the niche markets for some time. Financial services will be an early user, but it will spread to early adopters in other markets rapidly, and the while flash storage area and its channels will evolve and offer services behind it at a strategic level, with some new developer entrants, he concludes.