I’m a technophile (a lover of technology). So I get excited over the strangest things. Anyone who has read the blog before knows that I am a great fan of the move towards cloud services for one thing. But all technical progress is exciting to me. So as I’m going through the technology news, where I can hide from the world pretending that Donald Trump was not really elected, I find a couple of gems. Firstly, that the ATO is upgrading their storage arrays* to HPE All-flash systems. This mean the storage array contains all solid state drives.
For those who don’t know I’ll give a brief description of the difference between all-flash solid state disks and the current technology (yet gradually being made obsolete) hard drives. A hard drive is a disk or a series of disks that have a read/write head that searches the disk for the requested information. The gap between requesting the information and the providing of the information to you is known as the seek time. Obviously this is because the hard drive has to physically move the read/write heard to where it is.
By contrast the SSD drive is made of the same stuff that your RAM is made of, which doesn’t suffer from the latency caused by seek time. The information I have for you average garden variety SSD drive that people install in their PCs can be anywhere up to double the speed of a standard hard drive. High end, tier one equipment such as the 3par would be much faster than that.
One interesting statistic that I like about the 3par is that it can fit 563 terabytes of data in a 1 rack unit space – disk storage arrays are stored in racks. One rack unit is about 4.5 cms in height. The racks are usually about 19 or 23 inches wide, depending on the rack. So in rough terms that is enough storage space for 563 times the average home PC in a space not that much larger than a home PC.. ah technology.
Here’s the article about the ATO installing their new technology.
Disclaimer: I am not associated with HP (nor do I want to be).
*A storage array is a group of discs linked together to provide the large volumes of storage capacity used by enterprises.
Shaun
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