Flash has outstripped Moore’s Law. If software development caught up, the solid-state datacentre would be a cost-effective reality, bringing a step-change in agility and performance.

That is, flash used not just to accelerate IT, but to transform it – and in the process to enable whole new ways of building applications and give IT the agility it needs to keep up with today’s business.

On the hardware side, most of what is needed is already here.

The first generation was flash as an adjunct, to accelerate servers and storage systems, including creating hybrid disk/flash storage arrays.

The second generation was relatively simple all-flash arrays as point solutions to accelerate specific applications that were I/O-bound.

The third generation was when all-flash arrays began to acquire the sort of management capabilities that are standard in traditional enterprise storage systems. This was when a company could move many, or all, of its applications onto the same shared all-flash array.

This is the key enabler for generation four, which expects storage to be built for general-purpose use, not as a point solution.

But the real change to fourth-generation flash does not come from hardware. It comes with the realisation that flash storage systems now allow IT to do things that simply were not possible before. That is because these new storage systems are more capable.

They are faster, they save space in the datacentre, draw less power and require less cooling, and provide far more consistent performance than mechanical storage.

By: DocMemory
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