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Bridging the Gap Between Storage and Memory

To dream the impossible dream: What if you could utilize a storage solution that is nearly as fast as memory but also features all of the other characteristics of enterprise-class storage arrays, including non-volatility, the ability to process much larger data sets and share data across the enterprise? Oh, and yes, the costs are in line with enterprise storage, not memory.

What could you do with a solution such as that? Which applications would you accelerate, and which groups of users would benefit? How would you be able to drive new business opportunities and enhance profitability for your organization?

Well, the impossible dream is no longer impossible, thanks to rack-scale flash, the next generation of enterprise storage solution. Developed and brought to market by Dell EMC, the DSSD D5 rack-scale flash storage solution bridges the performance gap between storage and memory, yet delivers all the benefits you would look for in an enterprise-class shared storage array.

Storage has always been a critical enabling piece of infrastructure for new generations of IT solutions. Years ago, as hard drive capacities jumped and price points fell, it became easy to put together disk arrays that delivered mainframe-class storage performance for enterprise applications but used industry-standard hardware for improved cost efficiency. The growing performance demands of workloads like data warehouses, online transaction processing, big data and applications running on distributed and parallel file systems accelerated the need for high-performance flash storage. But next-generation high-performance workloads were not always well served by flash arrays built around storage architectures dating back to the hard drive era.

That’s where rack-scale flash comes in. The technology’s ability to deliver near in-memory-class performance in a compact, appliance form factor but with much greater cost efficiency than memory makes it a great match for hot new applications that crave storage performance an order of magnitude greater than previously available. It is storage designed specifically for the most demanding analytics workloads of today and the future.

Market researcher IDC has done a good job of breaking down the best vertical markets for rack-scale flash into two categories: the largest market opportunities and the fastest-growing segments. IDC identified discrete manufacturing, banking, process manufacturing, professional services and healthcare as the largest markets for rack-scale flash, while pinpointing banking, securities and investment services, media, telecom and retail as the fastest-growing segments.1

   

What do all of these markets have in common? They are relying heavily on sophisticated new analytics functionality built around huge, rapidly growing data sets. In each of those segments, enterprises are capturing data from not only traditional computing endpoints, but also things like ATMs, point-of-purchase systems, self-service kiosks and the remarkable number of devices and systems that are part of the Internet of Things. But it’s not just the sheer capacity of data—or the fact that most of it is unstructured—that is driving demand for new a storage architecture embodied by rack-scale flash. It’s really about performance, measured in IOPS, throughput and—especially—latency.

For example, consider how a rack-scale flash storage solution can address a critical requirement such as fraud detection. Virtually all industries are facing increased risk of fraud due to a variety of factors, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. More demanding and numerous compliance mandates, legal exposure, customer experience problems and the risk of intellectual property theft all are converging into a perfect storm that needs to be ameliorated through extremely high-performance, near real-time and highly available analytics. And without the right storage architecture, critical information will be inaccessible when and where it is needed.

This is why rack-scale flash is a big deal. It is redefining the rules of the game for storage, which in turn is finally putting the potential of turbo-charged analytics within the grasp of enterprises. Such analytics capabilities are aimed at not only data scientists and systems analysts, but also line-of-business executives and savvy business users looking for a competitive edge.

To make this kind of breakthrough analytics capability a reality, organizations need a fresh new approach to storage infrastructure. Rack-scale flash represents that leverage point to put next-generation analytics in the hands of those who can benefit from it the most.

1EMC Debuts the Industry's First ‘Rack-Scale Flash’ Enterprise Storage Platform,” IDC, Feb. 2016

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