5 Misconceptions About AFAs – Veristor

This report was written by By Jason Grant, director of storage and data solutions, Veristor Systems, Inc. Prior to architecting IT solutions in he company, he was on the customer side himself as the senior storage architect for Beazer Homes USA, Inc. where he led the enterprise and remote office storage and data protection initiatives, transforming critical infrastructure components.
 
AFAs offer enhancements over HDD-based systems, especially when it comes to R/W performance and latency. This has garnered the attention of IT professionals, storage architects and data centers to consider the improvements that AFAs might bring to the applications they manage and the data they support. But for many, questions persist about where, when and how to deploy AFAs.
 
While some professionals wonder if AFAs are right for every situation, others wonder if they have earned a place in the data center at all. While these concerns are fair, they’re sometimes grounded in misconceptions or outdated information.

In this article, we’ll review some of the common myths associated with the move to AFAs, and we’ll do our best to set the record straight.
 
1 All-flash is an all-or-nothing proposition. False.
Data centers evolve; that’s just a fact of life for today’s technology-driven businesses. And that usually means there’s a healthy mix of legacy and next-generation platforms that co-exist within most environments. This is not only a product of evolution, it’s a matter of economics since it would be far too costly to unplug old solutions when their successors arrive. This is certainly true when it comes to storage, where infrastructure teams would neither be able to justify nor absorb the ‘rip and replace’ method for their perfectly good, cost-e?ective mechanical drives.
 
One of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to AFAs is that they require organizations to go ‘all flash.’ But there’s good news: adopting AFAs doesn’t require an organization to abandon their investments in spinning disk. HDD and flash-based arrays can coexist, and each has its place in the data center. And as we’ll explore below, flash is not necessarily ideal for every application, environment or site. That makes it critical for storage professionals to plan carefully for AFA adoption, identifying where the new generation of arrays makes the most sense based on both performance and cost factors.
 
2 AFAs are too expensive for widespread deployment. False.
It’s no misconception that flash storage can be more expensive than mechanical drives. And that can give today’s cost-conscious hardware teams a little pause as they consider where and how to invest their finite infrastructure dollars. All things equal, we’d all prefer to go with the most cost-e?ective solution. But with storage arrays, all things are not quite equal.
 
Today’s advanced AFAs offer several cost advantages that may not be evident by looking at a price tag alone. Improvements in rack density can translate into lower operational costs by reducing the data center footprint along with power and cooling costs. Furthermore, built-in innovations such as deduplication, compression and thin provisioning contribute to far better storage effciency than previous-generation arrays, which can reduce data sprawl and the operational overhead that comes with it.
 
The latest AFAs even come equipped with simplified administration interfaces that make storage easier to manage than ever before and bring management productivity to new heights. And if that’s not enough, the raw price per gigabit for flash storage is beginning to drop as adoption accelerates. The bottom line is that AFAs can add up to some serious TCO savings, which should make your finance department pretty happy.
 
3 Most applications don’t require AFA performance. False.
It’s no secret that AFAs offer substantial performance gains over HDD-based arrays. Their I/O speeds can provide a boost for high-performance applications. But for development and operations professionals alike, there’s a perception that these performance gains don’t justify the costs. That’s likely because many applications they support aren’t considered sensitive to I/O limitations.
 
But AFAs can help improve overall application performance in some important ways – even when pure I/O speed isn’t perceived as priority one. They accomplish this by reducing storage latency, an often-overlooked metric that reflects the aggregate time it takes a system to complete a storage transaction or data request. AFAs can typically find data blocks and begin each transfer faster than HDD-based arrays. This reduces wait times for every data transaction, resulting in a better end user experience for all types of applications. And that can help boost productivity across the board.
 
4 AFAs can improve performance for every type of application. False.
In recent years, AFAs have been touted as a magic bullet for application performance. And in many cases, the hype is real. There is no doubt that AFAs can provide improvements in the speed at which data can be accessed. But by no means does this apply to every application and data type under the sun.
 
AFAs shine when it comes to supporting workloads that depend on small blocks of data with random R/W patterns, such as transactional databases and analytical platforms. But for use cases that rely on large blocks of sequential data where the concern is more about total throughput than I/O and latency, AFAs may not be the right fit. Backup and recovery are good examples of sequential based applications that may not be able to take advantage of the performance improvements AFAs typically provide.
 
Additionally, there are still cases where the business case for AFAs is not yet justified. For example, unstructured data supporting user file systems and background applications that can tolerate high latency may be better suited to HDD for price/performance reasons, even when we factor in the lower operational costs of AFAs.
 
5 All AFAs are basically the same. False.
When it comes to technologies that are relatively new, we sometimes don’t see a tremendous amount of differentiation between the products that are available in the market. So, after only a few years of availability, one might expect most AFAs to look very similar to each other. But when we look at the many AFAs on the market today, options abound.
 
AFAs now support multiple platform types, architectural options, performance characteristics and capacity choices. Some are designed for very large enterprises, while others target the mid-market. Some support the ability to scale-up, while others focus on scale-out architectures. There are AFAs that are built for extremely transactional workloads and low latency environments, and others that were designed for general-purpose applications. There are even hybrid arrays that allow SSDs and HDDs to coexist in a single chassis.
 
While all these choices can help ensure that storage professionals find the right array for their needs, it can also be difficult to know which one to choose. That’s why it’s important to define and document the characteristics that are most important and build a strategy for evolution that factors in both short- and long-term requirements and goals.
 
Select Right AFA for the Job
With any new technology, there’s bound to be skepticism about whether it can deliver on all its promises and live up to all the hype. AFAs are no exception, and with their critical role in data and application delivery – the risks are worthy of careful consideration.
 
Having explored the myths and misconceptions surrounding AFAs, we can see that while this technology is relatively new, it’s well on the way to market maturity. That’s good news for storage professionals, who can add AFAs to their toolkits as a means of improving application performance, achieving new efficiencies in the data center and creating a storage architecture for tomorrow.
 
However, it’s important to note that AFAs are not designed with every situation in mind, and not all AFAs are created equal. That makes it critical to start with a strategy that uses AFAs in the right locations, for the right applications and for specific data sets. From there, it all comes down to selecting the right AFA for the job at hand.