SSD-Only Storage Challenges The Need For Tiers

Flash-based solid state disk (SSD) is poised to play a big role in enterprise storage due to its high-performance, stateful nature and moderate cost compared with DRAM, but figuring out how to use it is a challenge. All the major storage vendors have shoehorned flash drives into their existing disk architectures, but this approach exposes system bottlenecks and requires knowing what data to put on it or deploying still-developing automated tiering tools. This report focuses on opportunities to move to an SSD-only storage environment for any workload types, not just top-tier. It showcases a few emerging vendors that are challenging the notion that you need data tiering or disk drives at all and offering systems designed from the ground up for flash.