All-flash storage slowly making its mark on Aussie enterprise

Deakin University’s next storage refresh isn’t until 2017 but systems team leader Ryan Parker-Hill has already been playing with an all-flash array.

Deakin University – from hybrid to all-flash?

Such arrays were nascent – almost non-existent – when the university last refreshed its storage environment in 2013.

Parker-Hill recalls looking at an early all-flash box. As is still the case, the cost was predicated on achieving a high deduplication ratio on the data it was to store, and Parker-Hill wasn’t able to replicate the box’s claimed performance benchmarks internally.

“Based on that, there wasn’t much point going down that route,” he said. “At the time, hybrid arrays were just the best bang-for-buck.”

In total, Parker-Hill put four arrays through their paces for the 2013 refresh.

From that, the university ended up buying six Nimble Storage CS460G-X2 arrays for production, and some Nimble CS210 arrays for a test environment. All are a hybrid of flash and spinning disk.

Though its next refresh is still sometime away, Nimble has already made it interesting, launching its first all-flash arrays into the Australian market in February this year.

The existing relationship afforded Parker-Hill early access to the new all-flash array technology.

“We kicked it around, and it’s very impressive,” he said. “I can see a place for all-flash arrays in our environment if they’re cost effective. I’d be silly not to consider them. But for now we’ll just wait and see what happens [in the lead-up to the next refresh].”

One potential advantage Parker-Hill sees in the Nimble all-flash array is its ability to replicate to the university’s current Nimble hybrid arrays, “lowering the total cost of ownership of introducing all-flash into our environment”.

“It's the same management software and interface, and data can be moved between the hybrid arrays and the all-flash array in a group,” Parker-Hill said.

“If we were introducing another vendor into our environment the cost of entry would be much higher.”

Though he sees the potential for all-flash, Parker-Hill doesn’t necessarily believe it’s ready to become the sole storage medium in the enterprise.

“The vendors say the pricing of all-flash has come down a long way, but there’s still a bit to go before they are on-par with the price of disk,” he said.

“I don’t think we’ll be moving away from spinning disk completely quite yet.”