Storage is challenging, particularly when you’re dealing with complicated systems and old technology that require forklift upgrades. You want to deliver the best for your organization and customers as their trusted advisor, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult with the legacy reality of your current HDD-based system.
Consider this: Analysts expect exponential data growth over the next 5-10 years, with much of this growth being file and object data. The disk pundits will claim they can simply expand to support the demands of new data types such as AI/ML, health images, data protection repositories, video, and other file and object workloads, and sure, that’s an option, but let’s analyze the reality of this.
Myth#1: Disk Is Less Expensive than Flash
The tired old excuse is that all-flash is too expensive for data repositories, and the only economical choice is disk. In the past, that may have been a true statement—until now. Like many modern solutions in the electronics landscape, the technology is more affordable as time passes, and all-flash is now the most economical choice for any workload or data.
Taking management, power, cooling, and replacement into consideration, the value of disk storage no longer adds up. Switching from disk to all-flash can mean up to 40% lower TCO and 60% lower operational costs over six years. Pure Storage all-flash acquisition costs are now on par with HDD with under $0.20/GB raw and $.016/GiB for Evergreen//One™ storage-as-a-service (STaaS) offerings.
Environmental Concerns
Sustainability considerations and energy use are top concerns for C-level executives and their organizations. Especially now that AI investments are increasing power usage and data storage, there’s incredible scrutiny on reducing existing power needs. When it comes to sustainability, traditional disk-based storage solutions result in higher power usage, greater space requirements, and increased energy consumption through cooling. Data centers account for 2% of world energy consumption, and legacy storage such as disk can be up to 30% of the total data center power footprint. Pure Storage® DirectFlash® uses up to 85% less power and up to 95% less space. This translates to immediate environmental benefits.
Myth #2: Data Availability
Data growth and accessibility are a one-two punch. Your teams and customers are creating new data, but aging data is still incredibly valuable and needs to remain accessible for historical business decisions, compliance, and many other reasons. It’s assumed HDD capacity will scale at the same rate as data growth.
This is not the case. Conventional disk drive capacity is growing at a snail’s pace compared to Pure Storage DirectFlash. How can hard disks keep up when they only grow a few TB/year on average? On the other hand, Pure Storage DirectFlash provides seven times the density of HDDs. Tap into the industry’s largest drives now at 75TB, with plans for 300TB by 2026!
Figure 2: Capacity comparison of Pure Storage DirectFlash Modules to largest nearline HDD.
Myth #3: Disk Storage Is Easy to Manage
Legacy storage providers claim disk storage platforms are easy to manage and provide high uptime. However, failure rates increase as your disk storage platforms age. Is “just enough” good enough for your business? Pure Storage all-flash can deliver up to six nines uptime and also up to 20 times better reliability than spinning disk, reducing your e-waste by up to 85%. Easily scale to multi-petabyte level with intuitive management and without adding complexity and incremental resources.
Myth #4: Innovation
Who likes their weekends? (I know I do.) Why spend time scheduling downtime, driving the forklift, and doing all the heavy lifting to fix bugs on HDD storage arrays? Traditional hard drive platforms are time-locked, and updates only fix software bugs, seldom adding new value. A full hardware upgrade is the only way to get anything new, which means downtime for your business. Or, you can skip the painful upgrades and invest in Pure Storage. With Pure Storage Evergreen® non-disruptive upgrades, say goodbye to this business interruption forever. Evergreen takes the forklift out of the equation, giving you an ever-improving, self-updating ecosystem with zero downtime for updates. In fact, over 10,000 FlashArray™ systems five years and older are still in active service today, benefiting from continual updates.
So Many More Myths
Those are just a few of the many myths that disk will ask you to believe. Check out this one-stop guide to see more myths of disk and why it’s time to change to all-flash.
So you’ve convinced me. How do I get started?
Anytime a storage vendor touts something earth-shatteringly new, eventually, it falls on you to make it work. But this time, it’s different. With the all-new Pure//E™ Family, you now have a complete set of products that can be instantly deployed to support all your block, file, and object repository data—and replace those old spinning disks.
Simply choose the capacity you need (starting at 1PB) and tap into the vast data services ecosystem of Pure Storage at the same acquisition cost of disk and a massive 40% reduction in TCO. With a cost under $0.20/GB raw ($.016 per GiB for STaaS), there’s no longer a need to accept second best due to budget limitations.
