HP Touts Flash as the Future of Storage

The transition from legacy storage environments to flash-based systems is accelerating, and the increased performance of flash is helping to boost adoption rates, according to HP.

The use of 3Par, an HP all-flash storage system, has enabled the firm to offer cost-effective yet high-performance storage to customers.

Chris Johnson, EMEA vice president and general manager at HP, said that the volume of capacity has overtaken the price of storage for the first time.

“Customers are demanding a cheaper way to store data. What we have now is a lot of intelligent thought going into how that cost reduction can be delivered,” he said.

“That creates quite a lot of disruption and you have probably seen the market become very quickly crowded in the storage space.”

Johnson indicated that the transition from more expensive storage environments to all-flash arrays could be the beginning of the end for traditional data centres.

“There is now a compelling moment where our customers can transition from expensive legacy storage environments to all-flash data centre data arrays, delivering that performance, scale and massive cost reduction that flash is delivering,” he said.

Neil Thomas, product director at technology service provider Claranet, said that storage had become static before the arrival of flash, and that customer needs are rapidly changing.

“Customers are becoming software organisations. They are living and breathing by the software that they run their business on and the performance of that software is therefore very important,” he explained.

Claranet formerly used flash only in its top tier services such as large databases, but the business now uses flash in 85 percent of its services.

Tony Lock, director of research and analytics at Freeform Dynamics, said that business storage needs are changing and that flash is ideal for their new requirements.

“The adoption of new storage technologies has traditionally been quite slow. With flash that has really accelerated quite a lot,” he added.

“Flash has really, for storage, compressed that time window between new technology coming out and actually hitting the mainstream. That’s going to change even more in the next couple of years.”

HP recently revealed a range of 3Par storage arrays that offers storage at $1.50 per usable gigabyte, and an all-flash data centre.

Article from V3.co.uk: https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2416699/hp-touts-flash-as-the-future-of-storage