The arrival of the flash era

Flash memory moves from the niche market into the mainstream market and must cross the "performance-only" phase. Enterprise users need more extensive data service capabilities. The continuous and rapid growth of database applications means that all-flash arrays are slowly entering the enterprise-class core application market, and users hope to overcome the performance bottleneck with flash memory. The amount of data in the database itself is increasing. In many enterprises, the total capacity of a single database reaches tens of terabytes, plus a large number of data copies. Only an all-flash cluster array can meet the database processing performance requirements.

Traditional storage rules are being broken, and the old storage market landscape will change. In the traditional storage market, although EMC's business is still growing, but the growth rate has slowed down, and in the conversion process from the traditional disk array to the all-flash array, EMC will usher in a rare opportunity. The rapid rise of EMC XtremIO has given EMC a head start in the new all-flash array market. Later, one should not look beyond EMC's XtremIO's impact on EMC's original VMAX or VNX product sales.

EMC has made plans for the future development of flash from the height of corporate strategy. Divided into three phases:

In the first phase, the general pursuit of users is to improve performance. In 2008, EMC became the industry’s first company to put flash disks in enterprise storage arrays. At the time, the characteristics of flash memory could be summarized in six words, namely "high performance and high price". Flash memory is only a niche market, but market demand does exist. The later PCIe flash memory is also a typical example of high performance. However, "high performance, low latency" is only part of the user's needs. To allow flash memory to enter the mainstream market from the niche market, we must step into the next phase.

The second stage is the stage of data services. Of course, performance is very important. It is the foundation of flash memory. However, introducing new data services without sacrificing performance is what users really want from flash. The new data services mentioned here are not available on traditional disk arrays, such as in-line deduplication, in-line compression, read-write snapshots, etc., and the introduction of flash technology can easily implement these functions. Only through the second phase can flash really enter the mainstream market. EMC XtremIO has opened a door for users, and behind the door is endless data treasure. Historically, XtremIO all-flash arrays have grown fastest in all EMC product lines.

In the third stage, the goal of "Agile Data Center" was achieved. Ren Yuxiang firmly stated that flash memory will become an integral part of the next-generation agile data center. At this stage, flash memory will not only be used to solve single-point problems, such as the performance of a database or a private cloud. Flash memory will become the highest-end storage layer in an agile data center. Many people even think that flash memory is the only storage layer. "Although each customer's needs are different, the acceptance and speed of new things are not the same, but I personally believe that flash-based agile data centers are the future direction of development." Ren Yuxiang said.

At present, the reason that most users use flash memory is to accelerate the application. This will further divide the flash memory application market into two categories: application acceleration market and I/O intensive storage market. The application acceleration market can be further subdivided into two categories: one is for server acceleration, and the other is for flash memory cards for servers (Flash Adapter 90 is a product for this market); the other is 0. Layer storage, that is, shared memory focused on performance (FlashSystem 840 is designed for this market). According to IBM's analysis, the most important workload supported by server acceleration for such applications only accounts for about 1% of the user's actual workload, while the important workload supported by layer 0 storage only accounts for about 10% of the user's actual workload. . Although these two types of applications have a small share, they have opened up a breakthrough for the application of flash memory in enterprise customers.

However, for a commercial company, its goal is definitely a broader market and products with more growth opportunities. Therefore, apart from continuing to focus on and accelerate the two markets of server acceleration and Tier 0 storage, IBM is now focusing on the I/O-intensive storage market, which has a market share of 50%. What this market needs is I/O intensive shared memory that can provide abundant functions.

The application of flash memory has no industry restrictions, and flash memory applications can be found in all walks of life. Why is the success of the wardrobe in Sophia representative? Erik Eyberg solved the mystery, because the Sophia wardrobe used IBM's flash memory program, and immediately saw results. Sofia Wardrobe's use of flash memory, integrated capacity ROI increased by 50%, EBS monthly settlement cost report time from the previous 8 hours reduced to the current 4 hours, front-end operation bar code scanning response time from the previous 5 minutes reduced to the present 30 seconds. As IBM's "data economics," said, economical is the user's most concern.

The era of large-scale flash memory access to enterprise applications has arrived. Business users, what are you still hesitating?