eBook - Why Speed Matters - Our Hero Flash

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Flash Software Defined Architecture to Dramatically Improve Application Performance and Data Center Economics

Our Hero Flash:

OVERVIEW

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Table of Contents:

OVERVIEW

Speed Matters ..........................................................................................Hurry Up and Wait - The I/O Challenge ....................................................Will a Hero Please Rise? ...........................................................................Flash is Changing Business, and Here’s Why ...........................................Getting Started with Flash ......................................................................

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3Our Hero Flash: Flash Software Defined Architecture to Dramatically Improve Application Performance and Data Center Economics

Speed MattersThe immortal words of Ricky Bobby, “If you ain’t first, you’re last” could not be more true when it comes to business-critical application performance. The potential consequence of failing applications can mean the difference between a healthy, growing business and one that is struggling to keep pace with its competitors.

Latency can mean the difference between a fantastic or horrible Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) experience, an online order fulfilled or lost, a disasstified and lost customer due to a poor video stream experience, or even the timely discovery of a cure for a life-threatening disease.

Business-critical applications all have the need for immediate response times to ensure timely delivery of data. Speed matters.

Any delay in delivering data or processing poses a risk to the business but can also lead to:

The inability to gain timely insight into a businessIf critical data cannot be accessed when and where it is needed, the result is often poor decision making and sub-par results that could have otherwise been avoided.

A sharp decrease in the ability to predict businessoutcomesSolid financial projections at the project, line-of-business and company level depend on timely access to the best data available. Any inability to access and perform the necessary analytics on that data can hurt performance.

Speed Matters

Hurry Up and Wait - The I/O Challenge

Will a Hero Please Rise?

Flash is Changing the Industry, and Here’s Why

Getting Started with Flash

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Increasing customer dissatisfaction Today, customers have grown accustomed to 24x7x365 service and access to information. Anything less than this results in a poor overall customer experience. In this environment, being unable to deliver the information your customers want, when they want it, can lead not only to lost sales but also to lost customers and market share.

Unmanageable volumes, variety and velocity ofinformationBig data will continue to grow even bigger. As we continue to see innovation and adoption around the IoT (Internet of Things), the influx of machine data from sensors will be quite massive. With the unstoppable growth of data - and the reliance on this data - many IT departments are running into a wall in terms of the performance of key applications. Increased latency translates into frustrated users and missed opportunities for the business.

For the IT manager, determining how to address these concernswhile balancing user needs with timely implementation, scalability of solution, and ever-present budget restraints is never easy. And in the end, the best solution may not be what you think of first.

Speed Matters





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Hurry Up and Wait - The I/O ChallengeIn the past, the way system-wide latency issues were resolved was to throw more compute power or memory at the system. This resulted in minimal overall improvements and came with significant costs.

When database performance is the issue, a common approach has been to invest millions of dollars to tune and improve efficiency of the SQL statements. While this investment can result in performance improvements, the real limiting factor is poor storage I/O, which cannot be fixed with SQL tuning.

A great way to waste time and resources is to have the really fast CPU waiting on information from the storage system. The impressive processing power of modern CPUs far out-pace the speed at which hard disk drive based storage can deliver data to them.

No one feels this gap in performance more than the I/O intensive database servers. The result is that super fast processors and massive amounts of bandwidth are wasted because HDDs take several milliseconds – an eternity for modern CPUs – to access and retrieve requested data. When servers wait on storage, users wait on servers, creating a poor experience.

The performance of the storage, not processor speed or insufficient memory, is the root cause of application performance issues.


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Speed Matters





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It’s not rocket science, it’s just basic physicsWhile the data moves through Flash (solid state components) and the underlying network essentially at the speed of light, hard drives move mechanically, relying on physical movement around a rotating platter to access information. Although they are generally reliable devices and have established themselves as mainstream when it comes to data storage, when it comes to data delivery speeds, HDDs are the weak link in the chain.

But wait, there are fixes for HDD latency, right? There are work-arounds to HDD related latency issues, such as adding disks to JBOD or RAID. By increasing the number of disks, the I/O from a database can be spread across more physical devices. Unfortunately, this approach has been shown to have a trivial impact on decreasing the HDD bottleneck.

Another approach is to move frequently accessed files to their own disks. But while this will deliver the best I/O performance available from a single hard drive, the I/O capability of such a drive is very limited. At best, a single hard drive can deliver 300 IOs per second (IOPS), which is nowhere close to the I/O performance needed to close the gap.

A final approach in using traditional HDDs is to move from a JBOD to a RAID implementation. This type of move will provide additional performance, particularly when a high-volume cache controller is used in front of the disk drives to stripe storage across multiple disks. But to reach the high IOPS necessary to meet user demand, the number of hard disk drives required can easily become prohibitive due to cost, space requirements, power and cooling and even their overall weight.

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Speed Matters





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Will a Hero Please Rise? Due to the large performance gap between the speeds of modern compute systems and the HDD based storage systems, there is a need for a champion - a hero - to rise up and conquer. What we need is a new, faster type of storage.

Enter our hero Opportunities to truly innovate are quite rare. Flash technology has created this opportunity to not only deliver massive I/O performance but to transform the ease-of-use and to deliver business value as well as data center economics.

Flash storage systems are solid state devices designed to solve the problem of I/O wait time by providing substantially faster access times and lower-latency IOPS than a HDD. In simple terms, a SSD doesn’t have any moving mechanical parts that handle data. Because of new technology and improved economics, it is now possible to build storage systems based entirely on flash.

Flash storage systems can either complement or replace traditional hard disk arrays in many business critical applications, including ERP systems, transactional databases and analytical applications such as BI.

The latest Flash storage systems minimize I/O wait time by delivering access times that are 250 times faster than HDDs (0.2 milliseconds versus 5). And with the faster access times, Flash storage systems can deliver 1,333 times more IOPS than a HDD (more than 400,000 IOPS versus 300). These improvements can result in a dramatic decrease in storage-driven latency.

Speed Matters





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Where Flash really shinesFlash storage can deliver the biggest performance boost to the applications that run highly transactional, I/O-intensive workloads with random read-intensive or write-intensive I/O. In most enterprises, these are the business-critical applications that impact the bottom line. OLTP (Online Transaction Processing), Data Warehousing and VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) are a few of the key applications that come to mind. In these workloads, Flash storage can support business-accelerating projects by bringing new levels of real-time responsiveness.

OLTP workloads are most commonly used in e-commerce, banking, online catalogs, store registers and ATMs. In these uses, the response times to user requests are critical. Flash storage can help improve the e-commerce web page responsiveness during the peak hours providing shorter wait times. Less waiting results in a higher customer satisfaction whereas slow responses may mean a loss of business. Faster user access to product features or pricing may mean more revenue through a higher number of completed and fewer abandoned sales transactions.

Data warehousing workloads include data mining, trend analysis, business modeling and hypothesis testing that are vital in today’s competitive environment. To stay competitive, enterprises need to process analytical intelligence or generate reports just-in-time to make data-related decisions that provide an immediate ROI. By evaluating incoming sales results, businesses can adjust their overall strategy in real-time. For these workloads, Flash can help deliver quicker business insights by increasing the speed of completing batch jobs.

In VDI deployments, where a centralized server hosts a desktop OS within a Virtual Machine, Flash reduces log-on time latencies during boot storms and helps maintain high host IOPS and throughput. This performance is essential to the end-user satisfaction level. If the end-users are happy, then VDI adoption rates rise and often lead to the overall success of the VDI deployment projects.

Speed Matters





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Flash is Changing Business, and Here’s WhyFlash became practical for the enterprise due to a staggering increase in consumer demand for the technology starting with the first Apple iPhone in 2007. Since that time, the surge in demand for Flash spurred innovation drove down flash prices while increasing its storage density. Flash has hit the mainstream which has helped change the way many businesses do business.

Naturally, we’ve seen the cost of Flash technology decrease over time but the real benefit from Flash isn’t truly about reduced operating costs. Flash has created completely new opportunities for businesses to innovate across the board.

New Innovative TechnologiesFlash has enabled new technologies like hyper-converged infrastructure which simply were not possible before using traditional enterprise disk. These new platforms are helping to power some of the most innovative companies and important organizations in the world.

Go-To-Market StrategiesNew go-to-market strategies are helping businesses be on the cutting edge and lead in an ultra-competitive landscape. These strategies are being formed and modified in almost real-time, thanks to modern business intelligence and analytics platforms, powered by our hero, Flash.

Customer ServiceWe’re seeing customer service radically change as companies are able to leverage faster analytics and metrics to decrease the time needed to help a customer. We all know that “Time is Money” but the real benefit to the business here is the improved customer engagement experience. Companies that can better connect with their customers, faster, will retain their business and grow their revenues.

Speed Matters



Flash is Changing Business, and Here’s Why


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HealthcareFlash is changing the face of healthcare as we know it. This is truly one of the more exciting and inspiring areas to be transformed for the betterment of society through technology. World-class research and treatment centers like City of Hope are using Flash to not only enhance the patient experience but to drastically improve research to treat cancer, diabetes and other life-threatening diseases.

City of Hope built a private cloud for its agility and uses Flash to put the patient’s data at the doctors fingertips. The doctors are now able to access x rays, scans and images immediately to better diagnose and provide treatment for their patients. Before Flash, this data was very difficult to render and deliver to the doctors in a timely manner.

Although there are now substantial cost benefits to Flash, the real benefit is the innovation and improved customer and patient experience which simply was not possible before.

Speed Matters



Flash is Changing Business, and Here’s Why


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Getting Started with FlashTo get the most from Flash within your company, it’s important to strategically use it to best maximize its effectiveness and cost efficiencies. Not all applications require an all-Flash solution but many of the business-critical applications do.

The key is to know which application(s) should be moved over to Flash and which may still be best served by a traditional HDD or even a hybrid storage solution. Flash has always made your applications and infrastructure faster, but now it can lower your data center costs as well.

Our goal is to provide you with the financial, operational, and business benefits of moving from traditional spinning disk to flash. We start by engaging in a yourBusiness conversation, where we take steps together to understand your business, your goals and the challenges along with the current state of your infrastructure and technology. We then take a deep dive into the existing infrastructure to develop an outcome that is strategically aligned with the goals and objectives of your business.

YourBusiness is a fundamental process that we have developed over the course of our 20 years of Enterprise IT consulting experience. We have hundreds of customers of all sizes that span multiple industries that we do business with. Simply put, we create Clients for Life.

We are ready to help you reduce cost, minimize risk, and maximize your business success today.

Not all applications will benefit from Flash, but the ones that do, are often the ones most critical to your business.

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eBook - Why Speed Matters - Our Hero Flash