Flash storage is at an inflection point. With prices moving south, it is already the preferred choice for active data. As prices fall further, its adoption in the enterprise space will rise even more. The inherent advantages of low power consumption, enhanced performance and reduced noise offered by flash storage make it a compelling choice for corporates. A time will come, sooner than later, when the price points of flash storage and traditional storage will converge. This would create a scenario akin to a Ferrari being offered at the price of a Maruti. Which one would be preferred I am sure is not a tough guess at all.
This piece, however, is not meant to extol the virtues of flash over traditional storage. I wish to draw the attention of CIOs, who are looking to implement flash in their enterprises, to two core issues that they would encounter in their deployment journey.
Benefit Vs Spend
The first challenge that a CIO would have to confront is to do a thorough cost-benefit analysis. While the prices have declined, flash is still expensive compared to traditional storage. Therefore, a CIO will need to come up with a very compelling business case for his CFO to give a go-ahead for such an investment. For certain businesses, flash storage could make complete sense, while for others, it may not provide the desired ROI. As an enterprise technology leader, the onus of answering the big question of benefit versus spend lies on the CIO.
Let me illustrate this with a real life example of a CIO in a bank. As an anti-money laundering procedure, any large bank in India has to check for a transaction against a list of 10 million names instantaneously. If the name matches with any of the 10 million entities on the list, the transaction has to be stopped. This bank was taking as long as 24 hours for the name match procedure. The CIO deployed flash and the time taken was shortened to just 2 hours.
Similarly, it makes sense for a bank that serves millions of ATM customers. To ensure fast response time for such a service, the bank will have to deploy thousands of hard discs together. However, the hard discs are in fact a waste. They have not been deployed for capacity; they are supposed to enhance performance
