The Era of All-Scenario All-Flash Storage Is Here
According to Gartner, solid-state drives (SSDs) have surpassed hard disk drives (HDDs) in market share and shipments since 2022. The implementation of mass unstructured data into production decision-making systems signals the new era of all-flash storage has arrived.
Trends
Global shipments of SSDs far exceeds that of HDDsIn 2022, SSDs held over double the market share (at 65%) and shipments of HDDs, illustrating that enterprises are embracing all-flash storage.
Figure 1: SSD market share and shipment proportion
Higher-performance all-flash storage significantly improves enterprise efficiency and service experience
SSDs far outperform HDDs in storage performance. A single SSD has thousands of times higher IOPS than an HDD, and can deliver millisecond- or even microsecond-level latency as well as high throughput. These characteristics make SSDs more suitable for the high-requirement scenarios associated with emerging services.
As data volumes increase sharply, enterprises will find it difficult to complete scheduled backup during backup windows (usually at night), even if average performance is required. Compared with HDD-based backup systems, all-flash backup storage systems can deliver double the backup performance and a four-fold higher recovery performance. In the past, backup systems mainly used HDDs to store cold data. Now these systems are gradually switching to all-flash backup storage for quicker backup and recovery.
All-flash storage has an obvious advantage in TCO over HDD storage
A higher number of cell layers, quad-level cells (QLCs), and penta-level cells (PLCs) will not only drastically reduce the price of a single SSD, but also cause storage costs at the same physical capacity to continuously decline.
NAND cells are a core component of enterprise-level SSDs, and often determine the cost of SSDs. QLCs and extra cell layers in 3D NAND are driving a steady decline in the equipment costs of all-flash storage. Most mainstream vendors now mass produce 176-layer 3D NAND cells, and multiple 200-layer design roadmaps have been released, nearly doubling the layers we saw in 2018. In addition to prioritizing stacking layers, triple-level cells (TLCs) are becoming a mainstream choice for enterprise-level SSDs, which have given rise to QLC SSDs.
Data reduction technologies for SSDs are evolving rapidly, driving down the effective capacity costs
In typical unstructured data scenarios like satellite remote sensing, data reduction ratios can reach 2:1. For autonomous driving and PACS imaging scenarios, the ratios reach 1.5:1 and 3:1, respectively. Data reduction technologies have reduced the purchase cost of all-flash storage considerably. In backup scenarios, all-flash backup storage also provides a 50% higher data reduction ratio than benchmark HDD backup storage thanks to global deduplication, similarity-based inline deduplication, and semantic-level deduplication technologies.
Large-capacity SSDs help continuously decrease equipment room footprints and the energy consumption of data centers
In the next two to three years, the capacity of a single SSD will be 1.5 to 2 times higher than that of an HDD, or potentially even more, with comparable power consumption. Therefore, large-capacity SSDs are critical for enterprise data centers to reduce the energy needed. Furthermore, SSDs are more reliable than HDDs. The 5-year return repair rate of SSDs is only 1.75%, four times lower than HDDs.
To sum up, as SSDs help enterprises reduce their CAPEX, footprint, and power consumption, they have become an alternative for replacing HDDs in high-performance production and transaction systems. In addition, SSDs can also be used to store warm and cold data such as backup data and mass unstructured data. As a result, the TCO for all-flash backup storage over a five-year period is 50% to 60% lower than that of benchmark HDD backup storage. In terms of scale-out storage designed for mass unstructured data, an SSD can be used to replace an HDD and offer the same available capacity. Notably, the TCO of SSD-based scale-out storage and HDD-based models will remain the same over a five-year timeframe.
Figure 2: Maximum capacity of a single HDD or SSD
Suggestions
Tailor all-flash storage plans to current and future enterprise data volumes and requirements
Enterprises should work with storage providers to evaluate future data volumes and service pressure trends to formulate all-flash storage strategies and analyze benefits and O&M cost changes after the strategies are implemented.
Seize opportunities to replace legacy storage with all-flash models
HDDs are common in many enterprise storage environments, and most will soon reach the end of their warranty periods. Enterprises undergoing digital transformation are in urgent need of better, more performant storage devices. This presents an excellent opportunity for storage enterprises to promote all-flash storage.
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