Fujitsu Storage Eternus AF

All-Flash Storage: The Superhero of the IT World  

When you hear the word “flash,” you might envision the superhero “The Flash” with his super-human speed: a meta-human that can run at Mach 3.3 and finds inventive ways to use that speed to defeat villains and solve world problems.

Consider flash storage as the superhero of the data world. Flash storage can highlight the data you need and serve it up in, well, a flash. This super-human digital speed means faster and more reliable access to your data. It may not help you to vanquish any villains, but it will give you a strategic advantage over your business competitors.

Whether you know it or not, you’re already using flash storage. It is how photos are stored on your digital camera and how smartphones, tablets, and game consoles handle your data. It’s integrated into solid-state drives on desktop computers. Recent breakthroughs have made flash storage at scale affordable for enterprises of any size.

Solid State Drive (SSD) vs. Hard Disk Drive (HDD)

What’s been the industry standard since the 1950s, Hard Disk Drive (HDD) technology relies on spinning disks, readable and writable heads, and magnetism to store data. By comparison, it’s slower and more error-prone than today’s flash storage technology.

Flash storage builds on Solid State Drive (SSD) technology. It has integrated circuits and no moving parts. This high-speed programmable memory can write data and perform I/O operations in a more efficient manner than traditional storage solutions. This higher throughput speed, coupled with lower latency, makes a significant difference in overall performance.

Why Choose Flash Storage?

Today’s data driven economy has created a new world – one dependent on information being in the right place at the right time. The amount of data being stored today is expanding at an incredible rate. Enterprises are finding an ever-expanding number of data volumes. As the volume of data and the volume of disks grow, you can be left with slow and often unpredictable data access.

This is why responsive all flash arrays are becoming the new normal in the data center.

Consider Fujitsu All Flash SDD. The FUJITSU Storage ETERNUS AF accelerates, modernizes and transforms data centers in a flash new world. Built on a powerful architecture, it delivers all the strengths of flash storage, plus seamless management integration with existing disk storage environments, thus ensuring a smooth transition of data centers to flash.

Fujitsu ETERNUS AF helps you accelerate business processes to meet business demands all at an affordable price point.

Flash storage solves these challenges.

Accelerated Performance

To realize the value of data storage, organizations need to be able to process the data to use it. Flash storage provides accelerated application performance. It speeds up literally every interaction with an IOPS (input/output operations per second) of 10X traditional HDDs. That can mean a response time that’s as much as 500 times better than disk storage.

Faster speeds are great, but it can become a challenge when more people need to access that data at the same time. Flash storage has exceptionally low latency and prevents spikes even as more users access the data. It is the perfect solution for applications and environments that have heavy I/O needs and high transaction workloads.

Higher Capacity

High-density flash storage solutions also have a higher capacity while taking up dramatically less space in Data Centers. It can provide 10X higher density than traditional data storage solutions. You will be able to store more data in less space. This allows for more efficient use of existing space and may reduce the need to expand or build new Data Centers.

Lower Operating Costs

Not only does this reduce the physical footprint, but it can also help reduce power and cooling costs. That’s no small consideration. Power consumption is one of the major costs in managing Data Centers accounting for an average of 10% of operating costs. Consulting firm Gartner estimates the power costs are increasing by approximately 10% a year and that Data Center power consumption costs will increase to 15% of operating expenditures (opex) within five years.

While flash storage might be slightly more expensive on the front-end, it provides a lower TCO (total cost of ownership) over its life cycle.

Fewer Points of Failure

With no moving parts, there are fewer points of failure. All-flash data arrays can replicate data across sections so that if even if one section fails, it’s already backed up without manual intervention.

Less Manual Maintenance

Flash storage needs less overall manual maintenance. You can set priorities and response times which allows SDD devices to automatically prioritize workloads and automate application allocations.

With flash storage, you need fewer storage specialists to manage your SAN or NAS, provisioning, tiers, or deduplication. This frees up your IT staff to handle other projects.

More Uptime

Any way you slice it, downtime costs you time and money. Flash storage provides a more resilient ecosystem. If there’s ever a problem, you have the ability to maintain operations with little impact. Recovery is faster and can be handled with minimal – if any – disruption. That’s because solid-state all-flash drives have an uptime unsurpassed by anything else on the market: 99.9999 percent uptime. On an annual basis, that equates to 9 seconds of downtime a year (or less).

Flash Storage Is A Better Solution

Organizations are turning to flash storage at a rapid pace. 37% of enterprises surveyed by TechTarget report they are planning to invest in software-defined storage and server-side flash for their Data Center. Businesses are moving to all-flash storage or hybrid-flash storage solutions as they add capacity to the existing infrastructure.

Today’s demanding business environment means everything needs to move faster than ever. Real-time analytics and instant access to business intelligence need to be available wherever and whenever you need it. The increased adoption of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning (ML), and big data initiatives demand a faster and more robust ecosystem.

Fujitsu Flash storage may be just the superhero your organization needs to improve reliability and efficiency while reducing your total overall cost of ownership.

North American Systems, International (NASI) can help you get the benefits of flash without disruptive migrations.  If you’re considering moving to an all Flash Storage, need to expand your flash storage, we can help. Find out how you can modernize your data center:  Ask A Question, Get A Quote or call on us today:  952-374-6700.