Reaching the Summit
Woody Hutsell, AppICU
If you’ve worked for a small company you know making progress sometimes happens in baby steps. You deal with constrained resources. You deal with hasty or delayed decisions. You just deal with reality. We went through seven or so generations of RAM based SSD systems at TMS before we got to a solution I considered the pinnacle of achievement, the RamSan-440. It combined performance and reliability features that were the class of the industry. Even a year after flash solutions were released by TMS, I still recommended the RamSan-440 despite its higher cost per capacity.
You almost have to have been intimate to the all flash array business since its inception in 2007 to fully appreciate this next comment, but if you were and/or still are you will understand. Since the RamSan-500 and earliest competitor systems there has been a product engineering battle raging between competitors to develop the ultimate single box highly available all flash solution. Single box HA solutions are desirable for their improved density, performance, power and cost to deploy and support. This was a battle that could only be engaged by companies with real hardware engineering talent (a talent missing from most all-flash players today). For years, Tier 0 all flash arrays had to be deployed with 2x the capacity for 1x the usable capacity because of a range of issues including: lack of full redundancy in components, lack of hot swap components, lack of easy access to hot swap components and the inability of systems to have firmware upgrades without requiring downtime. These deficits resulted in a creative mix of deployment architectures to resolve the issue some more elegantly than others. Each product iteration has gotten us measurably closer to summiting this peak but not reached the peak. Similar issues surround competitor products with some farther behind than others. The achievement in the FlashSystem 840 is that it has reached the summit. I could not be happier with the product team who defined this product or the development team that brought it to market.
For more information on the FlashSystem 840, which IBM just announced yesterday, I encourage you to visit: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/data/flash/storage/infographic/flash-data-center-optimized.html
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