What Are All Flash Data Centres?

An all-flash data centre or All-Flash Array (AFA) is a still a storage infrastructure, however it uses flash memory drives instead of using spinning-disk drives. Making it a faster and all round better performing infrastructure.

All-flash storage is on a rapid growth path. According to IDC, sales of all-flash arrays grew 87% during the first quarter of 2016 vs the same quarter in 2015. With solid state drive (SSD) capacities going up and the price per gigabyte falling NetApp anticipate that it won’t be long before SSDs are cheaper than spinning disk.

Benefits Of All Flash Data Centres

Optimised Performance

All flash eliminated performance bottlenecks. It also has sustained sub-second latency performance for data as well as allowing the user to reclaim time spent waiting on applications. All flash also has the potential to accelerate customer-facing applications and improve the digital experience on a whole.

Increase Flexibility

Increase flexibility allows you to move your data to where it delivers the most value. Other flexibility increases include:

  •  Optimise data placement across flash, disk and cloud
  • Combine SAN and NAS on a single, consolidated infrastructure
  • Scale performance and capacity without disrupting operations

Reclaim Simplicity

Flash eliminates tedious performance tuning and can help free-up time for strategic projects. Here are just a few statistics on how it reclaims simplicity:

• 48% savings in time and money for IT admin

• 16% reduction in maintenance costs

• Average payback period less than 6 months Another powerful factor for flash is the simplicity it brings to NetApp and to customers.

Boost Capacity

Flash has historically been deployed for performance workloads, but the unified capabilities of NetApp’s next generation of flash enable businesses to support the less performance-sensitive applications which are the bulk of data centre applications. These include virtualisation, home directories, engineering workloads, IaaS & tier 2 databases.

Storage Infrastructure Solutions With Creative ITC

Creative delivers real-world IT infrastructure solutions for today, to take you where you need to go tomorrow. We design and deliver agile solutions across five continents, turning our customers’ challenges into stunning business outcomes. Contact us today to discuss our range of solutions.