They’re looking at Flash cache, all flash and hybrid arrays. In terms of what they choose, it’s a question of “horse for courses”, customers have a broad spectrum of requirements and partners like Trilogy have to ensure their portfolio can match all those requirements. Partners also need the technical expertise to have these conversations with customers.
The other important point for Casey is that while many partners can offer a wide array of different types of storage, there’s another conversation to be had around how to manage it.
“We can wrap a managed service around storage arrays for them,” he says. “We can proactively manage and move their requirements around arrays.” In addition, Trilogy is beginning to open up conversations with customers around storage on demand. “It’s about having the availability and flexibility to meet their demands,” Casey says.
“We… try to change the point of attack, to say you can buy storage but this is how we manage it for you” – John Casey, Trilogy
With storage companies busy redefining themselves as software companies, many incorporate software suites that enable partners to manage and monitor their storage. Partners like Trilogy can exploit this technology to pull everything together into a single portal for the customer, not just for storage but for compute and the network as well, and deliver it for a monthly managed service fee.
From Casey’s perspective, it’s been a successful path to take. “Trilogy has experienced double digit growth for the last number of years and we expect the same for next year and beyond. We also try to change the point of attack, to say you can buy storage but this is how we manage it for you.”
Edin Mekic, senior technical architect at Comsys is unequivocal: “Disk is not dead.” He argues there is a strong case for using HDDs in a number of situations. For example, for large data sets, skewed I/O patterns, data warehousing, unstructured data (file data) and archives. He expects HDDs to continue to dominate in industries such as media/entertainment, healthcare, life sciences, oil/gas and video surveillance.
Flash arrays are better suited to in-memory databases, high-transactional OLTP, latency-sensitive workloads, random I/O, VDI, database test/dev environments and data that can dedupe well.
Mekic argues there needs to be a distinction between different types of arrays: purpose-built all-Flash arrays (AFA) and Flash-optimised (hybrid). Flash could gain market share on server-side caching, known as Tier 0, based on PCI Flash cards, but the units still lack proper capacity to satisfy the workload demands.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers