Flash: The disruptive technology powering your mobile life

One of the powerful trends that is transforming IT is Mobile - the use of smartphones, tablet computers and new form factor PCs to access applications and information from anywhere. Mobile is increasingly playing a key role in driving the journey to the third platform of IT.

The Mobile trend has pervaded our everyday lives. It is so closely intertwined with our lifestyles – our unique habits, preferences and expectations, that we sometimes take no notice of it.  

- Habits: Some days you might decide to start your shopping earlier or complete your banking on your smartphone while you’re in transit on your daily commute. 

- Preferences: It is about knowing how you want your news delivered and why you always go to a particular store first to shop for, find and purchase the perfect outfit for a special occasion. 

- Expectations: It’s expecting instant access to the right information to help you manage everything important to you – from finances to your health or staying connected with friends.

A remarkable, nearly-invisible technology rests at the intersection of billions of people around the world and their every waking moment. 

Flash technology is a core technology that was born in the consumer world, has grown up quickly—gotten more affordable—and now is a strategic element of most next generation data centers. Flash enables a unique window to our own personalized world, and for some is woven throughout life as a constant companion as they run, sleep, wake up, talk, eat, sit and walk. It makes today’s on-the-run lifestyle possible. 

What’s so special about Flash? 

- Flash delivers unprecedented data access performance for both random and sequential data, delivering superior application throughput and response time performance for virtualized environments; 

- Flash is a semiconductor technology, involving no mechanical parts 

- Flash consumes much less power, as there are no disks to spin and no mechanical arms to move, and requires much less cooling, helping alleviate over taxed data center environments.

Flash storage technology remains one of the biggest technology disruptors in the history of computing—both consumer grade and enterprise grade flash. Whether a powerful small chip to turbocharge the performance in a camera or phone or whether an enterprise drive that is turbocharging a database application—flash is central to delivering orders of magnitude better performance to the databases, virtual environments and analytics powering this “Market of One” experience to users. 

Mobile also means “mobile as sensors”—in an era of Big Data. Machine data generated by an increasing number of devices is also fed back into the "global analytics engine" for organizations to slice and dice as ingredients to improve the customer experience. 

And what does this mean for organizations? It means their IT workloads will require varying levels of scale, performance and capacity. These enterprises will have an insatiable appetite for flash. Many of these performance-hungry workloads will continue to evolve to not just use, but rely upon enterprise flash. 

Flash storage technology remains one of the biggest technology disruptors in the history of computing, driving innovation in the storage market.

Flash is transforming the way we think about storage. Ubiquitous in data centers at all levels, it is enabling innovation across IT.

Through organic innovation and strategically acquired technologies, EMC has

developed one of the most comprehensive flash portfolios in the industry which  includes flash-optimized hybrid arrays, server-flash solutions and all-flash arrays. EMC is focused on extending its lead in the enterprise flash market, offering customers a broad choice of flash solutions across a wide range of applications, use cases, capacity, performance, deployments and budget requirements.

EMC’s portfolio has flexible options that allow organizations of all sizes to bring enterprise-level availability to mission critical, performance-intensive applications.

All Flash Arrays Now… a Perfect Storm Perspective

As technology becomes more and more pervasive in our everyday lives—personal and professional—we have come to expect even more of technology in our business world.  

Over the last few decades processing and networking technologies have doubled their performance every eighteen months. However, the mechanical limitations of hard disk drives have prevented storage performance from advancing at the same speed. 

Architectural designs came along to mitigate portions of this performance gap through things such as the profiling of read access patterns to pre-fetch and cache data in main memory, in anticipation to future reads. 

 

In summary… All Flash Arrays 

- Narrow the performance gap between processing, network and storage, eliminating some enduring Input/Output challenges; 

- Meet the very random data access needs of strategic applications such as Virtualized workloads, virtual desktop infrastructures, and database & analytics, enabling them to scale, and; 

- Allow a whole re-design of storage services that are wholly enabled by Flash technology, bringing a new era for storage arrays with the dawn of all flash arrays. 

Flash continues to be a major disruptive force – and an incredible market opportunity in storage. There is an insatiable appetite for performance driven by next generation data center workloads in both physical and virtual environments. EMC’s strategy is to leverage flash technology across the entire storage infrastructure with a best-of-breed product portfolio that allows us to deliver customers choice.