Flash Storage Architecture: What's Available and Why It Matters

Everyone in the storage market is excited about flash. As well they should be. Flash can deliver much better performance than spinning disks. In addition, the cost of flash media is starting to come down to a level where all enterprises should consider adding flash-based storage to their enterprise storage infrastructure.

Yet amidst all this excitement there is also confusion. In particular, as vendors introduce a variety of all-flash and hybrid-flash storage systems, many storage administrators are confused as to the differences between the systems, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of each of them. Almost all current products in the flash storage landscape can be broken down into four different types of system architectures – all-flash, post-process tiering hybrid, caching hybrid, and continuous tiering hybrid – each with its own unique characteristics.

By comparing flash storage architectures side by side, storage administrators can better understand what flash architectures – and by extension what flash products – make the most sense for their particular set of applications. In doing so, they are likely to find that while flash has improved enterprise storage system performance, until recently storage system architectures have failed to keep up with media and other technology advancements, and fully leveraged these technologies to deliver better performance while minimizing data storage costs.

In this slideshow, Jacob Cherian, vice president of product strategy at Reduxio, takes a closer look at the four flash storage architectures currently on the market.