All-Flash Data Centers: Why This Time It’s for Real
- By Winston Thomas
- July 01, 2023
You feel like you’re scratching your head when you look at why there aren’t that many all-flash data centers; you are not alone.
According to a Gartner report, data centers account for 1-2% of all global energy consumption—with storage responsible for 25-40% of the energy consumed in data centers. An all-flash storage solution can help address growing concerns about energy costs and data center power constraints, especially as governments look to limit power.
And while flash storage began at a higher price point, Moore’s Law has seen this hurdle disappear. Yet, hard disks continue to be the significant medium that locks up the majority of data globally.
If Pure Storage has its way, the all-flash data center days may be nearer than you think. And it's throwing a lot of investment and ingenuity to make it happen.
The war against the spindle
So why does Pure Storage think now it’s time for all-flash data centers? Paul Bruton, Pure Storage’s principal data architect, pointed to ESG as a critical new motivation.
Regulators and governments are now pushing hard against large data centers to become more energy efficient and reduce their carbon footprint. For hyperscalers or owners of large data centers, being efficient makes economic sense. The same Gartner report above notes that modern all-flash solutions require up to 80% less power and space, reduce e-waste, and deliver long-term savings while improving over time.
Then, there is the factor that no one thinks about: weight. “The other factor that we’re seeing quite a lot that many people do not think of initially is the weight of the legacy solutions,” says Bruton.
High loading from hard disk equipment has made data center floors sparse simply because of insufficient loading capacity. This is especially an issue for companies looking to refurbish current buildings into data centers. It means a waste of space and a lower ROI because you are not converting the additional space into data storage revenues. A lighter chassis and profile make flash drives a lot more attractive and, in turn, allows them to pack more storage in a smaller footprint.
At the same time, many companies are reaching their lifecycle refresh. Coupled with the latest advancements in flash-based technology that make it more commercially attractive, companies are taking a serious look at all-flash.
This is one reason why Pure Storage decided to launch its FlashBlade//E. The solution is aimed at modern storage demands for files and objects and does it at a commercially competitive level.
Bruton believes that FlashBlade//E and the Pure //E Family significantly changes the total cost of ownership argument for all-flash data centers. He points to the economical price point of raw NAND and the higher densities that can be reached as the key reasons.
“What's really getting the attention is that we can start to deliver flash-based technology at disk-based prices,” Bruton adds.
Lastly, flash drives offer a better answer in reliability. Bruton sees more companies asking about storage failure rates as they become more data-driven. All-flash storage solutions can offer 10-20 times more reliable all-flash storage, notes a white paper.
Better reliability also factors into the ESG equation. Investing in hardware designed to last and perform optimally cuts maintenance fees, minimizes waste, and reduces data center footprints.
It is an area where Pure Storage is investing heavily. It is also adding AIOps capabilities to give its customers more visibility of their infrastructure footprint.
“We report all this information back to the customers in near real-time via Pure1 AIOps. So a CXO-level person within an organization can jump in and see exactly what their technology and sustainability footprints look like. We also provide a “Projected Total Efficiency” number that see many organizations up to 85% more efficient than legacy footprints. You can't deliver these types of benefits with traditional disk-based technologies,” says Bruton.
Not all bytes are the same
Data types are becoming a drag on traditional data centers. The thumb rule is that 80% of your data will be unstructured; 20% structured.
This is old news for storage administrators. Managing images, emails, voice recordings and videos, logs, etc., can be challenging and a security liability, but not impossible.
What has changed is that today unstructured data has become valuable. One reason is data science advancement, which can now use different data types to make more accurate predictions faster. Another reason is machine learning and other AI models.
All these functions need quick access to historical data to learn and become efficient models. This means data access speeds.
“We're talking about repositories here in the petabytes, whether it's health and life sciences, medical imaging, or quantitative trading. These companies want historical data, so they can actually leverage it to gain insights,” says Bruton.
All-flash storage provides a capacity-optimized solution that is easy to manage and consolidates unstructured data repository workloads to petabyte levels minus the storage management complexity.
“So the question becomes how companies can store this data at a lower total cost of ownership and with better access. It is where the better densities offered by Pure’s Direct Flash Modules become attractive,” Bruton adds.
Data centers are evolving
Lastly, data centers are changing from within. The traditional view of a data center is a central hub that acts as a data repository for all company data. Data moves in and out, but the company’s administration team has centralized control.
This is no longer true in many companies. Micro data centers are popping up on-premises near areas of operations for compute power. The advent of AI and the surge in IoT data saw many companies move to a hybrid architecture and move out from the cloud to on-premises. Then you have moving nano data centers, from autonomous drones, cars and trucks to naval submarines and warships that are on the move for months and need reliable and lightweight storage to compute locally without draining power too much.
“Most organizations have come up with a happy balance between what they can run in the cloud versus what they want on-premises. There's a lot of cloud adjacency capabilities coming into play,” says Bruton.
Bruton sees this as an opportunity for flash storage to make its mark. And it is also an area of enormous interest for hyperscalers motivated to be part of the cloud adjacency value proposition.
“We're already seeing some cloud providers leveraging our technology for these cloud adjacency models to deliver faster capabilities,” observes Bruton.
More importantly, data centers are no longer just an IT conversation. In today’s companies, legal, compliance and security are taking a more substantial interest in storage as regulatory rules become tighter and more cyberattacks target storage.
Chief data officers and digital officers are also taking an acute interest as data access can now impact app performance and machine learning speeds. DevOps teams using infrastructure-as-code (IaC) are also becoming interested, giving birth to a new area called AppOps or storage-as-code.
“You can't do this off traditional systems. We're seeing an exponential leap in GPU and GPU-based technologies but driving these workloads with traditional systems can be quite challenging. You can only start to derive the benefits from these in real time with technologies like all-flash,” concludes Bruton.
Winston Thomas is the editor-in-chief of CDOTrends and DigitalWorkforceTrends. He’s a singularity believer, a blockchain enthusiast, and believes we already live in a metaverse. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/Andrey Suslov
Winston Thomas
Winston Thomas is the editor-in-chief of CDOTrends. He likes to piece together the weird and wondering tech puzzle for readers and identify groundbreaking business models led by tech while waiting for the singularity.