Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Hard Drives Will Dominate Flash in 2022
By George Crump, CMO, StorONE
The notion of the all-flash array will come to an end in 2022, and hard drives will become the dominant media choice of data centers. All-Flash Arrays have made their gains in the market for two reasons. First, AFA vendors have claimed price parity to hard disk drives, and second, the concept of moving data between the two storage mediums is too risky. The reality is that with current 18TB drives and the soon-to-be-released 20TB drives, hard disk media enjoys at least a 10X price advantage per TB over flash drives.
For hard disk drives to regain their dominance in the market, the software that drives storage systems must improve dramatically to enable IT to see these drives as practical alternatives. There are three significant challenges that storage software vendors need to address. The first is lowering the time it takes a hard disk system to recover from media failure. In most cases, when vendors use the current crop of high-density HDDs, it takes them days to return volumes to a protected state after a media failure. While the recovery, also known as a RAID rebuild, occurs, performance degrades, and data is at risk.
Second, the storage software must get better at data placement as the capacity of the drives is consumed. As more than 50% of their available capacity is allocated to storing data, most storage systems begin to decline in performance. The reason for this decline is poor data placement calculations. The storage system must waste time calculating where to place the data with less available space. The result is latency which noticeably impacts performance.
Finally, hard disk manufacturers have roadmaps indicating a gradual doubling of capacity over the next ten years. Storage software vendors need to ensure that their storage systems can mix drives of different sizes into the same volume, so customers don’t have to migrate data and can take full advantage of the additional per-drive capacity.
Storage vendors that force their customers to all-flash are taking the easy way out of a severe problem with the foundational components of their storage software.
Modern storage solutions need new algorithms that can:
- Quickly rebuild volumes made up of high-density drives within hours, not days
- Utilize 90% or more of available capacity without impacting performance
- Mix new hard drive densities as they come to market.
Armed with modern storage software, IT can use high-density drives to lower costs without compromising performance or data protection.
##
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George is currently the chief marketing officer for StorONE. He has over 25 years of experience in the storage industry, holding executive sales and engineer positions. Before joining StorONE, he was the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland.
