Posted on Wednesday, March 15, 2017 in Enterprise Storage, Flash Storage, Storage, Storage Hardware
With sales volumes falling, you could be mistaken for believing the on-site storage market is dead. And with the advent of increased capacity All Flash Arrays (AFA) and accelerating uptake of cloud services, it would be logical to think that the future of magnetic spinning disks are nearly over.
But the newly consolidated, market leader Dell EMC’s president David Goulden does not agree:
“I think disk is around to stay for a long time.”
Dell-uded?
The performance benefits of flash have seen a surge in uptake for super-fast arrays – so is Goulden simply trying to shore up the magnetic disk side of his business for as long as possible?
Speaking to CRN, Dell EMC’s chief marketing officer Jeremy Burton helped to clarify the issue:
“If you do the math, like an exabyte-scale system. I think if you save a penny a gigabyte, it’s $100 million. At a ridiculous scale, disk is still by far and away [less expensive]. Look, the big web scale guys could do it themselves and get the absolute minimal cost for that scale. It all adds up.”
So for businesses dealing with enormous archive datasets, there is still a strong financial case for magnetic disk storage arrays.
Taking those savings further
For Dell EMC, this means continuing to produce and sell new arrays containing spinning disk technology. But there is another way to further increase those at-scale cost savings – redeployment.
Proven, reliable EMC storage arrays that have reached post-warranty status still hold residual value – particularly if they are in good working order. With the assistance of a capable third party EMC support provider, these redundant assets can be redeployed into your archive infrastructure, providing additional low-cost capacity to handle your growing data archive.
In this scenario, magnetic disk storage has a very bright future – and it’s not restricted solely to Exabyte-scale archives either. Could it be that Dell EMC’s David Goulden is on to something?
Next steps
To learn more about repurposing your magnetic disk arrays for increased ROI, please get in touch.
– See more at: https://www.cds.net/blog/2017/03/disk-data-storage-not-dead/#sthash.l87tVNKA.dpuf