All Flash Arrays (AFA) have been the flavor of the month for some time now with the Storage bloggers, especially after EMC announced the GA of its XtremIO based All Flash Array.
The blogging activity on this started even before the announcement with Richard Harris blogging about it. Before EMC made its announcement, Harris had this interestingly titled blog post : “XtremeLY late XtremIO launch next week” It is an interesting post with Harris discussing in detail about the challenges EMC faces in this area and also about the delay in EMC getting the product to the market.
EMC’s response came in the form of a long and informative post by Chad Sakac, ‘Virtual Geek’. In this detailed post “XtremeIO; Taking the time to do it right”, Chad explains some of the details of the XtremIO and why it took time for EMC to release the product.
From the end user side, the well respected Martin Glassborow, ‘Storagebod’ seemed underwhelmed and said that he ‘Xpect More..’ The post asks some very pertinent questions. Given that it comes from an end user, I am sure all the vendors are keenly listening.
With the All Flash Arrays coming in, the question that gets asked by everyone now is “What type of workloads require such performance?”. The FUD against AFA but those who don’t have one is based on this question. The question is a genuine and a pertinent one but can always be twisted around to say that AFA is not needed in any case. Robin Harris takes on this question in his, “Ideal workload for enterprise arrays?” post. It had a good discussion in the comments section with Chad Sakac of EMC and NetApp employees weighing in. This lead Robin to do a followup “Best workload for enterprise arrays” post wherein he gave his response to the comments received in the earlier post.