The all-flash datacentre: Mirage or imminent reality?
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PA’s Alastair McAulay, a datacentre and cloud strategy expert, is featured in an article in Computer Weekly by Stephen Pritchard, on all-flash datacentres.
The article explores the idea of datacentres being run on flash storage which would replace conventional hard disk drives. Some IT teams have moved to a hybrid approach to mix both types of storage; some experts believe flash capacity will one day overtake that of hard disk drives.
Alastair comments: “The demise of the spinning hard disk cannot come soon enough. For the majority of use cases regardless of whether they are housed in laptops or datacentres, they consume more power, produce more heat and are more likely to fail without warning than their solid-state counterparts.”
He goes on to say: “However, flash storage is not the universal solution for an enterprise’s data storage needs, and there is a compelling case for an alternative.”
According to Alastair, there are regulations that require longer data retention periods, the need to provide vast datasets for AI, and the need for immutable copies of data which all point to the need for alternatives to flash, such as hard disk drives, but also tape and optical storage.
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