Sponsored Content

Sponsored content is a special advertising section provided by IT vendors. It features educational content and interactive media aligned to the topics of this web site.

Home > Flash Storage

Accelerating the Analytics Pipeline

Analytics at scale is one of the driving forces in business today. Organizations are looking to leverage the massive amounts of structured and unstructured data being generated to deliver real-time actionable insights across the business. One of the roadblocks to delivering on the real-time value of analytics at scale is the clogged analytics pipeline common to legacy business intelligence and analytics solutions.

Think of how a typical transaction may be processed: A customer buys something online, the Web server updates the ERP system, the ERP system sends a periodic batch of data to a data warehouse, the data then goes through an analytics engine and is analyzed along with other data, and then, eventually, it is put to actionable use by the business. It’s a pretty complex, time-consuming process. In addition, all of this data is spread across myriad technologies and applications, which doesn’t work so well in today’s era of near real-time and agile analytics.

The reality is you don’t have to have all of those physical silos anymore, and the movement of data among different workloads can be accelerated. With rack-scale flash storage, you can consolidate your mixed analytics workloads on a single storage platform, accelerating time to insight and lowering your costs.

The advent of rack-scale flash storage is changing everything for organizations looking to optimize analytics for enterprise-wide benefits. As much as earlier iterations of flash storage provided huge upticks in performance, availability, reliability and responsiveness over spinning disks, rack-scale flash storage—introduced by widely respected storage market leader Dell EMC—takes it much further. An order of magnitude further, in fact.

How does Dell EMC’s new rack-scale flash storage solution, DSSD D5, accelerate the analytics pipeline? One key principle that the developers of DSSD D5 adopted from the start was that this new class of flash storage shouldn’t simply be a reiteration of earlier architectures left over from the days when hard drives ruled the market. Instead, it had to be designed from the ground up for super-high bandwidth and extreme IOPS and low-latency performance. That meant introducing engineering concepts that were different from those incorporated into existing enterprise flash arrays, including:

  • A new I/O stack to facilitate direct links between applications and memory-mapped media.
  • A direct memory connection over the high-performance PCIe interface.
  • Custom flash modules, instead of off-the-shelf flash, that heightens visibility between flash cells and high-performance controllers.
  • An innovative data path design using distinct data and control paths to abstract data movement from server-based CPU activity.

The result of these and other engineering twists is an impressive portfolio of performance metrics, including 100 GB per second bandwidth, 10 million IOPS, and sub-100 microsecond latency. This delivers an order of magnitude improvement across all three of the key data-intensive analytics performance metrics compared with traditional flash storage.

   

This is a huge deal for enterprises that are turning to analytics to do everything from telling them how to better take advantage of customer buying behavior based on distribution channels to minimizing losses by analyzing which retail stores are experiencing higher than expected losses due to fraud, theft or out-of-stock inventory.

Add in other factors that are spiking the volume, variety and velocity of unstructured data—such as the preponderance of social media, expanding regulatory footprints, pervasive mobility, and the proliferation of smart devices in the Internet of Things era—and the conclusion is clear: The gigantic groundswell of data ripe for sophisticated analytics no longer can be adequately served by legacy storage architectures.

DSSD D5 rack-scale flash may be the most important purpose-built storage solution since the floppy disk drive was introduced more than 40 years ago. The full magnitude of its economic impact on enterprises may not be fully known for a while, but any organization looking to take analytics to a new level should dig deeply into this approach.

Disaster Recovery
Data Backup
Data Center
Sustainability and ESG
Close