Steve Pelletier looks at how flash storage’s ability to accelerate time-to-information could make it a key weapon for business and IT professionals seeking to deliver for IT infrastructure transformations that strike the right balance between performance and cost.
Today’s IT organisations face huge challenges. Issues like the ever-increasing array of applications, virtualisation, the cloud, and the rising value of stored information are combining to put huge pressure on IT departments. They must strive to increase performance and operate more efficiently – all while reducing costs.
Now, however, an emerging technology in terms of RAM and main storage, flash storage is helping business and technology leaders address these issues, by offering a means by which to make IT infrastructures more operationally efficient and speed up end-user and customer-facing business processes.
It is worth putting the benefits of flash storage in context here: In comparison to conventional spinning disks, flash storage systems deliver remarkable performance, and can make all the difference in scenarios where the business can benefit from improved application response times, accelerated access to information and increased power efficiency.
There is, then, no doubt that flash storage delivers on performance but, crucially, it also addresses the cost side of the equation.
Deployed in solid state drives, flash storage can also help businesses to shrink their IT infrastructures, deploying as few as 10 solid state drives to deliver storage performance equivalent to several hundred hard disk drives. This reduces storage footprints, power consumption, cooling needs and, therefore, costs.
But the benefits don’t end there. Beyond boosting performance and shrinking footprints, flash storage can also help to underpin crucial IT transformations, since it is also powerful enough to support an organisation’s most demanding virtualised cloud environments—along with online transaction processing, client virtualisation and business analytic applications.
So, whichever way you look at it, flash storage is likely to be a weapon of choice for IT professionals seeing to deliver that performance/cost equation – and more.
To find out more read the free white paper—Changing the Speed of Business.