A Guide to the Different Varieties of Flash Technology
As part of an ongoing effort to usurp more established vendors, Pure Storage, a provider of all-Flash arrays, has been drawing attention to how maintenance contracts unreasonably increase the total cost of storage. Today, the company announced that it is extending its Forever Flash offer to guarantee consistently flat or lower maintenance fees for the life of the product and no-cost replacement of hardware components whenever needed.
This latest update to the Forever Flash program extends an existing commitment to provide free controller upgrades with every three-year contract. Jason Nadeau, director of marketing for Pure Storage, says the ultimate goal is to make it more attractive for IT organizations to switch to an all-Flash array that is less costly to own than traditional magnetic storage over a multi-year period.
One of the reasons that some IT organizations have not made the switch to an all-Flash array has been the upfront costs associated with acquiring a new storage system. Nadeau says that as all-Flash systems continue to approach pricing parity with high-end magnetic storage systems, that will be less of an issue. In the meantime, Pure Storage is making a concerted effort to draw attention to how expensive the total cost of storage is because maintenance fees for legacy storage systems are so high.
Nadeau says I/O requests are more random than ever thanks to the rise of virtualization. There are so many different types of workloads running on servers these days that it’s exceedingly difficult to optimize the performance of magnetic storage systems. Flash storage systems take that issue off the table by being better able to serve the needs of multiple application workloads simultaneously, says Nadeau.
Of course, IT organizations are employing Flash memory in multiple places these days, starting with the server itself and then as a layer of cache on top of hybrid storage systems. But regardless of the path taken to adding Flash memory to the data center environment, IT organizations of all sizes would do well to take another look at what they are actually paying in maintenance fees over the life of a storage system maintenance contract.
