Comment Re:Because you're an idiot? (Score 1) 93
The systems I'm buying now will be obsolete by the time SSD can even think about touching hard drives in terms of capacity per $. Typically, the ONLY reason to go full SSD now for large storage capacities is because you absolutely need the performance and are willing to pay essentially "whatever it costs" (at least 8x+ the price) because it's that important to get the IOPS. Maybe by the end of next year we'll get it down to "only" 4x the price (not counting that though because price per GB for large capacity hard drives still continutes to fall, balancing out a part of the cost reduction in SSDs).
You're right, but also somewhat wrong.
"Raw capacity" is indeed quite expensive. However, the increased speeds of flash have made it possible to provide in-line data reduction services. Data reduction is a widely used term for two techniques: de-duplication and compression. This works on a block level. When the host writes a block, the system will look in its table to see if that block has already been written. If so, it will simply write a pointer. If not, it will be forwarded to the compression engine and stored. In the storage industry, a data reduction ratio of 1:6 is accepted as generally achievable, with higher rates possible on large virtualization clusters. This means that the effect cost per GB is reduced dramatically and even reaches the price of high-end disks. So your 80TB raw capacity array will store ~300TB of data, depending on the data reduction ratio.
On top of that, since flash performs so well, other features such as continuous data protection by (a)synchronous replication are possible with very little performance degradation.
If you still doubt this technology, go have a look at the technological advances in hard drives, versus the technological advances of flash in the last 5 years. Hard drive vendors have very little to innovate while flash/rram are at the lower end of a hockey stick figure when it comes to innovation and price reduction. Within the next 5 years, flash/rram will replace disk, both in the enterprise as well as the consumer market.
I'd love to see your all-disk array do 2M IOPS, something that all flash arrays are capable of today. Again, at the price that (with dedupe and compression) comes darn close to your disks. Even legacy storage vendors are increasingly investing in solid state technology. Investing in disk is equal to investing in Greek government bonds.