My first Magazine Nutanix Flash Forward | Page 9

Chapter 1: Surveying the State of IT for the Enterprise

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intended to help keep drives alive. From wear leveling — in
which a flash controller prevents a drive from pounding
the same cells over and over — to active write avoidance
techniques — such as deduplication and compression, which
reduce the need to write data in the first place, the issue of
whether a flash disk will fail during its usable life has been
practically solved.
The short version is this: Flash is here. It isn’t going anywhere.
It’s fast; it’s durable and dependable. And it’s becoming more
affordable every month.

Software‐defined functionality
At the same time that flash storage has become common in
the datacenter, Intel has continued to release processors with
massive numbers of cores just begging to be set free. The
plethora of computing performance is being wrangled into
submission through the use of powerful software tools, which
are steadily replacing functions that used to be handled solely
in hardware.
Why is this change important? In most cases, customized
hardware is expensive, particularly when the hardware is performing a task that can easily be solved by using a commodity CPU with software. ASICs and FPGAs require occasional
respinning — or updating — to remain viable. Over time this
solution becomes expensive, particularly when the functionality can easily be replaced with a pure software component.
Today, we’re seeing the rise of what has become known as the
software defined datacenter (SDDC), a phenomenon enabled
by commoditization of hardware. SDDCs allow far greater flexibility in datacenter configuration while also helping to reduce
overall costs.

Hardware commoditization
Remember when I mentioned that Intel processor in the previous section? Well, that company is at the core of another
revolution in the datacenter: hardware commoditization.

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