Vincent Hsu, an IBM Fellow and the CTO of the company’s storage business, provided his perspective on flash and its impact on the industry in an interview with Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante.

Hsu starts by highlighting the main problem with spinning disk: it’s considerably slower than silicon. Processors are ten times faster than they were a decade ago, but disk systems today are only 1.2-1.3 speedier than their predecessors from the early 2000’s. This performance gap has persisted for decades, forcing software developers and database architects to invest time and effort to step around the issue.

Hsu explains that because solid-state is up to par with modern CPUs, it eliminates the need for these complex workarounds and allows organizations to accomplish more in less time. Flash also solves the challenge of having a limited amount of metadata, since it’s fast enough to process workloads that would have required an impractical amount of DRAM just few years ago.

The ability to handle more metadata with greater efficiency will resolve yet another problem that many IT departments still face today: the lack of an effective means to share metadata between applications. Metadata is often ‘trapped’ inside switches, servers and other hardware devices that store this information in different formats depending on the raw data it’s extracted from; flash has the potential to tear down this barrier, according to Hsu.

Before wrapping up the interview, the executive brings up his company’s newly announced FlashSystem appliance. He says that the platform is able to make full use of the technology thanks to a combination of speedy storage from Taxes Memory Systems, an architecture that prevents bottlenecks from occurring in other parts of the system, and ultra-efficient middleware.