IT Transformation Trends: Flash Storage as a Strategic IT Asset
For decades, enterprise storage has been widely viewed as—let’s face it—an important but largely commoditized IT necessity. After all, every application needs storage. But following a highly innovative period in the 1980s and ‘90s, advances in enterprise storage slowed to a crawl compared with other IT functions. In fact, storage vendors’ products all evolved to be quite similar in terms of capabilities. That fact shouldn’t be surprising, as the key building block of enterprise storage—the disk drive—has itself only seen incremental improvement in that time, mainly in increased capacity and density. Performance, on the other hand, has actually declined tremendously during that same period when viewed on a per-GB basis, because per-drive capacities have increased while per-drive performance has remained roughly flat.
The disk drive—the building block of legacy storage—is finally giving way to a new and powerful form of media: flash. This is the same flash media that’s powering a consumer revolution with smartphones and myriads of other devices, as well as solidstate drives (SSDs) for personal computers. It’s also transforming enterprise storage in data centers everywhere, whether they’re operated by organizations, hosting and public cloud providers, or software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers.
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