What Your Company Needs to Know About Today's Flash Storage

By Proactive Solutions

Sep 14, 2020 12:51:46 PM

About 3 minutes

Flash storage is known for its ability to store tons of data while reducing your company’s data center footprint. However, today’s flash storage is capable of much more than meeting capacity needs and cutting infrastructure costs.

NVMe-based flash solutions significantly improve performance, meeting the needs of advanced applications, and draw on artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize data management. The latest flash solutions deliver efficiency, security, and infrastructure flexibility.

What Is NVMe?

Non-volatile memory express (NVMe) is designed especially for flash storage as a means to access storage media. NVMe lowers the latency rates of flash storage even further for more reliable and faster performance.

Compared to its competitors that can only offer a single command queue, NVMe can handle tens of thousands of commands while supporting tens of thousands of queues. Companies that adopt flash storage with NVMe architecture can handle huge volumes of data without experiencing bottlenecks.

Research from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) discovered that 35% of IT managers are already using NVMe-based flash storage and another 36% plan to implement it in the next 12 months. With NVMe-based flash, these organizations are prepared to meet the data capacity and performance demands of the future.

Superior Data Management

NVMe-based flash not only stores and processes data quickly, but manages it efficiently. AI capabilities are used to tier storage. Data can be sent to the cloud or to the all-flash array based on how frequently it is being accessed and used. Cold data can be archived on less expensive storage, while hot data can be stored in flash resources.

AI also allows NVMe-based flash users to consolidate data through compression. Built-in data reduction functionality allows users to shrink their data center footprint and related expenses even further than is possible with traditional flash.

Advanced Security

Top flash system arrays have been developed with data security and risk mitigation in mind. Data security tools, such as encryption and backup snapshots, are built in.

Some of today’s flash storage uses the cloud to create an air gap between the snapshots used for backup and recovery and production files. This security measure protects against ransomware attacks by denying access to backup data. NVMe-based flash users benefit from high levels of availability and seamless business continuity due to data protection capabilities.

Infrastructure Transformation

According to ESG, a third of IT leaders feel that selecting and deploying new technology is too complex, and almost a third of them believe that implementing new solutions takes too long. NVMe-based flash solves both these problems.

NVMe-based flash storage makes it easy to move data to a new storage solution, as well as to and from the cloud. Ease of migration empowers companies to take advantage of public, private, hybrid, and multicloud models.

How to Access the Latest and Greatest Flash Solutions

Not every flash solution that is available today will give your company the capabilities and features provided by NVMe-based flash. IBM FlashSystems Family offers NVMe-based storage architecture.

IBM FlashSystem Family makes it easy to organize and migrate data. Data storage performance and capacity is multiplied. FlashSystem users can build hybrid multicloud and take advantage of a range of data security tools. With IBM FlashSystem storage, companies benefit from flash storage virtualization for a software-defined approach to storage.

As an IBM Platinum Business Partner, ProActive Solutions can help your company transition to IBM FlashSystems. Our certified experts take a consultative approach to helping customers choose the flash storage solution that aligns most closely with their business goals.


Find out more about IBM FlashSystem Family from the experts at ProActive. Schedule a storage consultation today.

Tags: Flash storage, NVMe-based flash, IBM FlashSystems Family, non-volatile memory express