Intelligent CIO Kuwait Issue 2 | Page 11

LATEST INTELLIGENCE Each of these topics is covered in the sections that follow. As you consider these purchase criteria, it will be helpful to evaluate the strengths and limitations of your current storage solution. This can help you focus on the criteria that are most important based on your organisation’s needs. All-flash performance Most all-flash storage systems on the market utilise solid-state drives (SSDs) available from a number of different vendors (although a few vendors persist in building storage systems using custom NAND Flash modules rather than commercial SSDs). SSDs deliver superior performance versus hard disk drives (HDDs) in terms of the three most common storage performance metrics: • I/O Operations per Second (IOPS) • Throughput, usually measured in MB/sec • Latency, usually measured in milliseconds or microseconds. Different applications generate different I/O workloads. When you consider all-flash storage options, it’s important to think about the I/O characteristics of the workload or workloads you need to support. All-flash storage systems that offer quality of service (QoS) controls can provide significant advantages in situations where you are consolidating multiple applications on a single storage system, preventing any one application from consuming too many resources and allowing you to prioritise the most important applications. n Download whitepapers free from www.intelligentcio.com/me/whitepapers/ www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 11