Hybrid Storage = Best Data Storage Solution for High Performance Needs

When data storage can’t keep up with demand, IT departments are increasingly finding that adding more disks isn’t the best answer.  HDDs – although still a workhorse for most – continue to “win” on price, capacity, and availability, but SSDs’ speed and durability are a clear necessity in high performance environments.

Many companies in the HPC space are seeing requests for high performance storage solutions at an increasing rate, with demands for capacity staying at a relatively even keel thanks to data compression and other relatively recent technologies.

Capacity + Performance: Made More Manageable with Hybrid Arrays

Hybrid storage products are becoming a solution for IT that is both cost effective AND high performance, leveraging both the capacity of HDDs and the nimbleness of SSDs.  Fundamentally, hybrid arrays monitor the data from the HDD and cache the most frequently accessed bits to improve future performance. Hybrid storage arrays allow small file and large file workloads to be addressed from a single hybridized application.

This ability to balance workloads with various file sizes is critical as companies and organizations move toward processing and storing enormous sets of data.

And, these hybrid storage solutions continue to evolve, meeting the aggressive capacity and cost/IOPs requirements demanded by today’s big data and cloud computing needs. As a widely quoted Wikibon article states, for IO rates greater than 7000 IOs per Terabyte, the hybrid storage array approach is superior for high performance virtual environments.

With additional improvements constantly being developed for hybrid storage, like automatic drive tiering, rapid rebuilds, and increased block storage capacity, it’s clear that this is a solution worth exploring for highly demanding, high performance requirements environments.

See the ARI-100 Series from RAID, Inc.’s advanced hybrid storage/virtualization features, including autonomic drive tiering and rapid rebuilds or learn more about a massively scalable infrastructure w/Mellanox, Intel and RAID’s ARI-100.