EBOOK TRUE OR FALSE: DEBUNKING THE TOP FLASH STORAGE MYTHS A Note About Myths Versus Truth It has been said, “Truth is universal. However, the perception of truth often varies.” In many cases, a kernel of truth can transform into myth as it is passed down from one or more “reliable” sources until the end statement differs so much from the original as to be nearly unrecognizable. Yet, because that fuzzy end statement seems like it could be true, it is sometimes mistaken for fact. The real truth, in contrast, separates fact from hearsay. Along the way, it corrects inaccurate assumptions with objective and verifiable information. Whether you manage flash storage directly or work closely with people who do, we think you’ll find the following short list of myths to be a good way to get to the real truth about flash storage. 2 Diogenes looking for an honest man Myth #1: Flash Is a New Way to Store Data Myth #2: Flash Storage Is Better Suited The Truth: Flash is a new and faster medium for storing for Data Centers than for Public Clouds data, but it is not a new way to store data. Data stored on The Truth: Many all-flash storage solutions are designed flash still needs to be managed and protected, just as it with clouds in mind. For instance, NetApp® SolidFire® all- has always been. This includes protection against failed flash storage supports large-scale public or private cloud devices, protection against data corruption (intentional and infrastructures. Compatible with popular cloud orchestration accidental), and facilities for disaster recovery. In the early solutions, SolidFire was designed from the ground up days of flash adoption, customers were willing to sacrifice to handle the scale, performance, and management basic data management features for the sake of speed, but requirements of a large-scale cloud infrastructure. this is no longer the case. As flash storage has matured, the need for enterprise data management features has become Another example of cloud-ready flash storage is NetApp a requirement. ONTAP®, where customers can unify and simplify their data management across flash, disk, and cloud resources with common management tools for blocks, files, and objects, providing the foundation of an underlying data fabric. 3 Myth #3: Flash Storage Is Too Expensive Myth #4: Flash Storage Should Be Used for My Budget Only on High-Performance Workloads The Truth: In the early days of enterprise flash, high costs The Truth: Today’s enterprise must be fast, global, mobile, per gigabyte usually meant that only a few carefully chosen social, digital, and on demand all the time. These simultaneous workloads with ultrahigh-performance needs could justify the needs now require business as usual to operate more in the added cost of flash. Flash technology has since matured, and realm of high performance. Many next-generation workloads flash costs have decreased significantly. The use of enhanced will benefit from the high performance and low latency of data reduction technology has also caused flash storage flash storage. Whether an organization needs to generate efficiency to increase. Thanks to these factors, yesterday’s greater customer insight and engagement, create new boundary-pushing performance is no longer out of reach business models, or support an increasingly mobile workforce, for organizations wanting to use flash storage to help them the high performance and low latency of flash storage are well consolidate their current workloads. suited to support such fundamental business priorities. Figure 1) Flash moves towards price parity with HDD 4 Myth #5: SSDs Wear out More Quickly Of note is a recent report from the Usenix FAST’16 conference, than HDDs which analyzed SSD reliability within Google’s data centers over an extended period. The report concluded that during The Truth: Enterprise flash drives have impressive reliability. the first four years in operation, Google experienced a lower Unlike HDDs, flash drives have no spinning disk or moving field failure rate for SSDs (as low as 0.95% per year) than it parts, increasing their reliability. Also, advanced flash had experienced with HDDs (typically 2% to 9% per year). technologies have evolved to significantly increase flash lifespan by grouping (and minimizing) the overall number of Source: https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast16/technical-sessions/presentation/schroeder program/erase cycles made to flash storage cells. Figure 2) SSD reliability by flash model 5 Myth #6: Flash Storage Is Flash Storage — Myth #7: Flash Storage Devices Have It’s All the Same a Large Amount of Wasted Space The Truth: Some application environments have different The Truth: It takes a lot of faith for a vendor to guarantee flash storage needs than other application environments. certain levels of space savings. Yet that’s exactly what One might require the highest possible performance, while NetApp keeps doing. In fact, we believe so strongly you’ll get another might need robust data management that’s more more efficiency from NetApp ONTAP flash storage that we focused on application uptime and fault recovery. Still other guarantee a 4:1 reduction in capacity. application environments may have erratic, unpredictable growth and require the convenience of scaling out quickly. How do we make sure that ONTAP is space efficient? We use Whichever scenario, NetApp offers a flash solution tailored multiple efficiency techniques, including inline deduplication to application needs: and compression, Snapshot® copies, virtual clones, and thin provisioning. With the release of ONTAP 9, we’ve upped the • For those needing the utmost performance with sustained efficiency stakes again to include inline data compaction, a low latency, the top-performing EF-Series all-flash storage powerful new efficiency feature that packs even more data is highly recommended. into flash-based storage devices. • For those needing workload consolidation with enterprise application management functionality, NetApp AFF all-flash storage meets these needs with rich data management features that make sure of continuous operation, high performance, and guaranteed efficiency. • For those needing a next-generation, flash-optimized storage platform built around a webscale architecture, NetApp SolidFire all-flash storage provides guaranteed quality of service for multiple workloads. 6 Myth #8: Flash Storage Is Always was benchmarked by the Storage Performance Council (SPC) Blazingly Fast at well over 300K IOPS with record-setting latencies as low as 170 microseconds. The Truth: Using flash storage does not automatically make sure that applications will run 10x, 5x, or even 2x more quickly NetApp ONTAP all-flash scale-out storage solutions have long than traditional storage systems. This is especially true for been leaders in performance. In 2015, an eight-node ONTAP large flash storage systems that must deal with extensive flash cluster was benchmarked by SPC at over 685K IOPS metadata to provide for inline data reduction, wear leveling, with submillisecond latencies. To further substantiate the and garbage collection. This is why you often see all-flash ability to maintain high performance at scale, the NetApp storage systems use low-capacity flash devices. AFF was the first enterprise flash storage system to support 15TB SSDs, with a mind-bending 1PB effective capacity in a NetApp flash systems, in contrast, were designed for sustained 2U storage shelf (including inline data reduction). high performance. A NetApp EF-Series system, for instance, Predictable performance is also a vital capability of next- generation data centers. Until you have control over performance, your data center cannot make sure of predictability for multiworkload environments. Only SolidFire guarantees performance to every workload with true storage quality of service. With SolidFire, data centers have complete, independent control of performance and capacity, which are presented as independent resource pools. That means each storage volume within a SolidFire system can be allocated an exact amount of capacity and performance, both of which can be changed spontaneously without the need to migrate data Figure 3) NetApp AFF performance in Oracle database environments or affect operations. 7 Myth #9: Flash Storage Is Too Complicated In addition, the SolidFire true scale-out architecture delivers for Most Users to Operate Correctly simplicity through its flexible, independent scalability. Customers expand SolidFire storage clusters by simply adding The Truth: Getting the most out of flash storage can be tricky. new nodes, instantly expanding the capacity and performance Incorrectly sized LUNs, misconfigured VMs, and improperly of the flash storage system with automatic rebalancing of placed applications can wreak havoc on shared flash storage data across the cluster. systems. Fortunately, NetApp ONTAP all-flash systems can be factory-shipped and automatically preconfigured with best practice configurations for many common applications, such as those based on Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, VDI, and VMware. In under 10 minutes, these systems can be deployed and serving data. 8 Summary Flash storage technologies are moving quickly. The old myths no longer apply. In order to maximize your use of flash storage in powering enterprise applications, you’ll need to keep pace as well. Bookmark the following links to stay up-to-date with the latest flash storage developments: • NetApp all-flash storage • Tech OnTap® newsletter • SolidFire blog • NetApp technology blog 9 © 2016 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. No portions of this document may be reproduced without prior written consent of NetApp, Inc. Specifications are subject to change without notice. NetApp, the NetApp logo, ONTAP, Snapshot, SolidFire, and Tech OnTap are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. A current list of NetApp trademarks is available on the web at http://www.netapp.com/us/legal/netapptmlist.aspx. NA-237-0716.