What If All Data Were Hot Data? Flash Storage Hits Two Inflection Points

Within the enterprise data center, today's state of the art is the All-Flash Array, which depends upon non-volatile Flash storage to provide high performance and durability, as compared to the spinning disk technology that preceded it. Until recently, however, Flash arrays were decidedly more expensive than hard drives, prompting enterprises to implement a mix of different storage technologies for different purposes. At the high end, Flash supports high performance computing (HPC) and certain mission-critical tasks that require real-time processing of data – what we call'hot data.' For top performance, hot data require expensive network protocols like InfiniBand or similarly costly storage-area networks (SANs) that depend upon Fibre Channel networking technology. In the middle are'warm data' on hard drives that leverage earlier spinning disk technology. Due to their moving parts, such disks wear out with annoying frequency.