Flash arrays to spark real-time data market

Andrew Charlesworth, Computing, Friday 24 September 2010 at 17:14:00

Moore?s Law comes to storage-ville

Inexpensive high-density Flash storage arrays will democratise the use of
real-time and mobile data in business, says one of the pioneers of the
technology.

Dr Donald Basile, chief executive of
Violin
Memory, is currently promoting his company?s latest Toshiba-based 40TB Flash
memory array squeezed into a 3U package.

Compared with conventional magnetic spinning disks, devices like the Violin
3140 can operate at between 10 and 100 times the speed, take up less than a
fifth of the space and consume only a tenth of the power. This makes them the
only viable storage medium for dealing with real-time data for location-based
applications and to deal with the flood of data from intelligent connected
machines (also known as
?the
internet of things?), claims Basile.

?There are currently only a small number of infrastructures ? at firms like
Google and Amazon ? that can handle real-time data on any scale, and they have
spent millions of dollars building those networks,? Basile told
Computing. ?But using [Flash arrays] enterprises can use real-time data
with packaged applications.?

Spinning discs have not changed in fundamental design for over a decade and
have begun to hit the physical limits of their operation as the speed of the
disks approaches the speed of sound. The widespread use of Flash arrays, Basile
said, will restore the balance of Moore?s Law between microprocessor development
and storage development. Moore's Law means a device's performance doubles every
18 months.

Applications, such as location-based marketing, will never become widespread
without the uptake of underlying Flash array storage, he claimed.

?With location-based services you have a second or even a fraction of a
second to deliver the data to a mobile device.?

John Vaines, managing director of
Diamond
Point which sells Violin products in the UK, says the products can be
integrated into arrays of more than 500TB in one rack and can be managed through
conventional network and storage management tools.

Basile says Violin currently has three categories of customer: ISPs building
cloud service infrastructures, the US Federal Government (largely for real-time
signals processing), and financial institutions. But he says anyone with a large
database application is a potential customer.

?There?s no need to configure the database for speed of access any more
because the whole thing is in memory,? says Basile. ?The valuable brains that
used to do that sort of thing can be deployed doing something more valuable for
the organisation.?

Pricing has always been an issue when it comes to solid-state storage versus
spinning disk. Violin?s arrays are priced at ?below $16/GB? and, according to
Vaines, are comparable with hard disk storage when usable capacity is taken into
account.

Full story at http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2270403/flash-arrays-spark-real-market