As enterprises move through digital transformation, they are capturing, storing, protecting, and analyzing an increasing amount of data. Data growth rates for many enterprises exceed 30% per year, which means that many of them are already managing multi-petabyte (PB) data sets and considering how they will best manage tens of PBs in the coming years. The roughly 20% of all enterprise data that is used for latency-sensitive, mission-critical, primary workloads has largely already migrated to all-flash, but most of the data used for secondary storage workloads that are less latency-sensitive but much more cost- and capacity-sensitive still reside on hard disk drives (HDDs).
Recent industry developments, should prompt information technology (IT) organizations to question this strategy:
- Flash $/GB costs are going down at roughly 20% per year while HDD $/GB costs are dropping at only 2-3% per year. As this gap narrows, flash becomes cost-effective for more workloads.
- A Pure Storage flash device (called a “blade”) can easily deliver thousands of times the performance of an HDD [depending on whether you’re looking at latency, I/O operations per second (IOPS) or throughput]. Many secondary storage workloads don’t need much performance, but flash capabilities deliver needed performance with far fewer devices.
- Flash device capacities have outstripped the capacities of the largest HDDs. While HDD vendors are struggling to cost-effectively deliver 20TB capacities, Pure Storage® is already shipping a 48TB flash device and will be roughly tripling that capacity within the next 18 months in the same footprint.
- Based on these performance and capacity trends, a single flash device can replace multiple HDDs in systems sized to meet a given performance and capacity requirement. These flash devices require far less supporting hardware infrastructure, use far less energy, and take up far less floor space in data centers. With large multi-PB data sets, rising energy prices, and looming power grid limitations, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations are becoming important criteria in IT infrastructure purchases, an evolution which clearly favors flash.
Based on these trends, it is time to consider whether your secondary workloads can be more economically hosted on all-flash storage. Pure Storage helped lead the displacement of all-HDD storage for primary workloads over the last decade, and we believe that there are compelling reasons for moving many secondary storage workloads to all-flash now.