Are You Capitalizing on the Latest – and Fastest – Data Storage Solution?

When it comes to data storage, speed sells. Everyone wants the fastest storage they can get to run their business-critical applications and give end users the optimal performance they demand. At the same time, they want the cheapest storage they can find for their archived data that is still available to end users.

A rapidly changing world and client demand

The world of storage is changing rapidly. From laptops to large storage frames, solid state flash drives (SSDs) are taking over. A couple of years ago, SSD was five times more expensive than a comparable sized hard disk drives (HDD). One year ago, it was twice as expensive. But today they are almost the same price.

Meanwhile, the size of the SSD drives themselves is growing at a pace seen only in the RAM world.  Soon we will have 64TB SSD drives all but displacing the cheapest Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) drives. And the software is changing just as rapidly. Today, we get the benefit of Quality of Service to control the IOPS, which enables us to provide the different performance tiers our clients demand, along with deduplication to control costs and replication to enable disaster recovery.

Deeper into the data center

Previously, we would buy multiple types of SAN or NAS systems to meet our different client performance needs at the right price point. But with SSD drive density increasing and software controls in place, we are seeing a shift this year. 

In the past six months, we started taking a long look at going all SSD in the data center. No one wants buyer’s remorse and there are just too many advantages of going all SSD, so all of our latest storage purchases have been SSD-based. Ultimately, this is a win for the app owner, who gets the performance the end user is looking for at the right price, all due to hardware costs going down and newer software technology.

There’s no going back

The fact is, once you go SSD you’ll never go back to HDD. The cost parity is here and the improved software make it the perfect time to consolidate onto a single platform for all standard and critical business use storage needs.  If your laptop has an SSD drive, would you really be willing to go back to a spinning disk drive?