Are you ready for the Flash

As promised at the last #VMUGbe (#17) I did deliver a session for the latest #VMUGbe (#18) november 9th. Although I did switch to ‘the dark side’ in between now, I do try to keep up with some independent storage talk. One of the things I have been involved with this year, partially due to the Storage Tech Field Day 1 trip, is flash storage. What is it, who are they, what are the differences. 

Click on the image for the entire slide deck

Part 1:

Basics of storage placement, from DRAM to Cloud tape. The advantages of fast and close versus slow and far away. Cost versus SLA.

Part 2:

What is FLASH? SLC, MLC, TLC, eMLC and future products like ReRAM, NRAM, PCM, … 

Part 3: 

Where is the Flash and who are the players. 

• In Server: DRAM: in memory databases (SQL/Hadoop) or L1 cache (Nexenta) / Server side flash: tiering versus caching ( FusionIO, Micron, EMC Lightning, …) / new kids around the blocks: VNMe – SCSIe
• All Flash arrays: commodity hardware ( Kaminario) / build your own eMLC / smart filesystem flash offloading (PureStorage) / Purpose build PCIe (Violin) / and many others
• Tiered/Hybrid SAN solutions: legacy vendors (HP/DELL/EMC/…) versus startups. No RAID (NimbleStorage) / Dedupe/Compression & Offload (Tintri) / L1-L2-… offloading to disk (Nexenta) / Building blocks (Nutanix)