HDS Moves to Accelerate Flash Storage Adoption

Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2016

Looking accelerate the adoption of Flash memory for primary storage in the data center, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) this week unveiled a series of hybrid and all-Flash arrays along with an analytics application designed to help IT organizations figure out where best to apply Flash storage.

Hitachi Data Center Analytics monitors both Hitachi and third-party storage to identify and resolve performance issues and enable more effective capacity planning. IT organizations can then use that data to inform Hitachi Automation Director, an application HDS has created that enables users to self-service their own Flash storage requirements.

Bob Madaio, senior director of product marketing for HDS, says the cost of Flash storage has reached the point where it doesn’t make sense to use magnetic disks for primary storage. As such, HDS is expecting, in one form or another, a mass migration to Flash storage. Not only will applications accessing Flash storage run faster, Madaio says that savings generated in terms of the reduced physical space and reduced energy consumption are too much for IT organizations to ignore.

Other forms of storage, such as magnetic disks and tape, will continue to be used for secondary and tertiary storage. But when it comes to primary storage, Madaio says HDS will be advising customers depending on the use case to either deploy Flash modules, all-Flash arrays or hybrid storage offerings from HDS to access as much as 448TB of data.

Given the current affordability of Flash storage, most IT organizations at this point will soon be transforming how they manage storage in the data center. There will still be plenty of magnetic disks inside the data center. But the days when storage administrators spent most of their time trying to optimize where data needs to physically land on those disks are finally coming to a close.