It is not a surprise now that SSD or Flash drives are now mainstream. The rotating hard drive is still around, but for specific use cases… mostly in “Cheap and Deep” storage, video streaming and archiving purposes. Even with 10TB densities, these drives are destined for the junk yard at some point.

Flash storage is approaching 32TB+ later this year and the cost is coming down fast. Do you remember when a 200GB flash drive was about 30k? It wasn’t that long ago. But with flash storage growing so quickly, what does that mean for performance? Durability? Manageability?

These are real-world challenges as flash storage vendors are just concerned with making them bigger, we as consumers cannot just assume that they are all the same. They are not… As the drives get bigger, the performance of flash drives start to level out. The good thing for us is that when we design storage solutions, the bottleneck is no longer in the SAN with flash. So we too can take the emphasis off of performance. The Performance conversation has now become the “uncool” thing. Nobody wants to have that conversation anymore. The bottleneck has now shifted to the application, the people, the process. That’s right! The bottleneck now is with the business. With networking at 10Gb/40Gb and servers so dense and powerful, this allows the business to finally focus on things that matter to the business. This is the reason we see such a big shift into the cloud, app/application development and IoT. Flash is the enabler for businesses to FINALLY start to focus on business and not infrastructure.

So, back to the technical discussion here…

Durability is less of an issue with large flash drives because of the abundant amount of cells available for writes and re-writes. The predictability of drive failures mitigates the need for management of the common unstable legacy storage.

Manageability is easier with SDS (software defined storage) and Hyper-converged systems. These systems can handle faults much better through the distributed design and the software’s ability to be elastic, thus achieving uptime that exceeds 5 nines.

So as flash storage grows, it becomes less exciting. Flash is paving the way to a new kind of storage,the NVMe.