#54 – Are we at All-flash and HDD Array Price Parity?

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the subject of price parity between all-flash and hybrid or HDD-based storage arrays.  From Martin’s perspective, he is starting to see vendor pricing getting close to parity and it making more sense to buy all-flash than a spinning media device.  However, what are the issues?  TCO is one – it’s not all about array pricing.  Also, flash offers more opportunity to be Opex focused, as it’s easier to increment flash in an array than adding many disks to maintain performance.

So what about hybrid?  Does it have a position, if the marketing is going all-flash for traditional workloads and all-HDD for archive and unstructured data?  The conversation closes on questioning whether vendors offering rental rather than buy makes sense and whether the industry can afford not to go all-flash.

During the podcast, we mention Chris Mellor’s article on flash revenue.  You can find it here.  We also talk about the Micron 5120 QLC SSD.  You can find some thoughts on that product here.  Finally, we talk about the 40-year anniversary Intel x86 processor.  You can find more details here.

Elapsed Time:  00:25:58

Timeline

• 00:00:00 – Intros
• 00:01:00 – Are we at price parity between all-flash and disk-based systems?
• 00:01:30 – What’s being pushed out?  15K, 10K drives?
• 00:02:30 – On what basis are we seeing price parity, raw, usable/effective?
• 00:03:30 – TCO is important, flash provides better environmental costs.
• 00:05:00 – Licensing – should you have to pay for licences you will never use? (discussed on #39)
• 00:06:30 – How is the price for flash declining? (discussed on #9)
• 00:08:20 – The 100TB flash drive. (discussed on #44)
• 00:09:00 – With flash, do we need tiering?
• 00:10:00 – Will we have a spectrum of flash or will SLC and MLC disappear?
• 00:14:00 – Could flash drives actually last much longer than the vendors claim?
• 00:14:50 – Backblaze data, making choices from available information.
• 00:18:00 – Are we at a time when a flash-first policy is realistic?
• 00:19:00 – Is there any point to hybrid arrays?
• 00:20:30 – Now that prices are in parity, would an Opex solution be more appropriate?
• 00:22:00 – Does flash make it easier to buy on demand and expand at smaller increments?
• 00:24:00 – Can we afford not to move to a flash solution with todays performance needs?
• 00:25:00 – It’s a Wrap

Podcast: Play in new window | Download