The dramatic size increase of stored datasets, coupled with enterprise demand for faster computing, has driven significant innovation in the data storage industry. The traditional solution of high-performance flash storage systems have historically been too expensive to deploy at large scale, but data reduction technologies are driving flash technology forward in the information technology sector. 

“There’s a lot of really cool things happening from an innovation and technology perspective,” said Scott Delandy (pictured), technology director of storage at Dell EMC. Firsthand observations from engineers to product managers gives Delandy an understanding of their challenges, as well as their expectations for the immediate future.

Delandy spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaDaliMartin) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the latest technology enabling companies to leverage more flash-based storage in their infrastructure. (* Disclosure below.) 

A smaller data footprint

Flash is top of mind when it comes to the latest storage technology, known for its high performance but also high cost compared to more traditional mechanical storage systems, such as spinning disk or tape. Aside from the price the flash itself coming down in recent years, Delandy pointed out a number of technological innovations that have made flash an increasingly economical storage option.

“You think of things like data reduction technologies, compression, dedupe, thin provisioning, snapshots, all of these type of things where we typically see about a four-to-one space efficiency. So if I’ve got 100 terabytes, I paid for that 100 terabytes of capacity, but through all of these technologies, I can make that look like 400 terabytes to the outside world,” Delandy said.

These methods of data reduction dramatically change the cost curve for storage, improving efficiencies and affordability over earlier methods that leveraged hybrid arrays or spinning disk drives, according to Delandy.

While the increased economic viability of flash storage allows companies to deploy larger computing operations onto purely flash arrays, the management and services tied to the underlying flash system must also be on the cutting edge to benefit from the boost in performance. Delandy gave an example of a customer running over 50,000 virtual machines on a single Dell EMC VMAX flash storage system.

“You think of just how massive that is — you put 50,000 of anything on one storage system, you need to make sure you’ve got the performance, you’ve got the scale, you’ve got the reliability, you’ve got the data services. Those are the things that people need to be able to do consolidation at that scale,” Delandy said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Dell EMC have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE