Why now is the moment for high-density flash storage

AI workloads have caused an enterprise data storage rethink. As training sets and AI inference requirements drive up data volumes, 83% of IT shops are scrambling to upgrade capacity this year, according to research from ESG.^[1] Eighty per cent of those survey respondents also dumped more data into the public cloud due to AI needs. They face a double whammy of on-prem capacity constraints and potentially eye-watering plus egress bills that make it difficult to support the AI models they want.

In that scenario, every storage efficiency win counts, including improvements in storage density. That's where quad-level storage (QLC) flash comes into play. It stores four bits of data in a single cell, unlike single-level cell storage (SLC) which stores one, and multi-level storage (MLC) which stores two. QLC historically had a reputation for performance issues and media that died young. However, today's QLC is different, offering real storage density benefits for the enterprise.

Storage vendors have pushed QLC into the enterprise

It isn't so much an increase in the quality of QLC memory media that enables them to do this as an increase in controller quality. The controllers are the gatekeeper for the storage media, ensuring that data is stored safely and quickly. They use techniques such as dynamic error management, SLC write caching, and wear leveling to ensure that the data they're storing will be reliably retrievable.

The techniques shouldn't be important to enterprise customers, as long as the outcomes are positive. The time has long passed when data storage admins needed to analyze vendor technology to ensure that the drives did what they expected. Today, storage vendors offer strong contracts that put the liability for enterprise storage squarely in their corner, with meaningful guarantees on capacity and longevity.

QLC is increasingly important in AI environments. As data volumes increase, QLC gives vendors and customers alike breathing room to cope with it. It enables modern scale-out architectures to deliver linear scalability from terabytes to multi-petabytes, which is exactly what AI needs.

The cloud didn't eat everything

QLC is important because even after two decades of cloud computing, companies still park critical data on their own premises. Lawyers and regulators demand it. So now many companies operate in hybrid environments.

AI doesn't care where that data is or how difficult it will be for you to deliver it in a uniform way; the technology needs all of it. So storage platforms that can't bridge organizational silos and hybrid infrastructure won't cut it. ESG found that 71% of IT teams struggle when connecting storage to AI pipelines. Enterprise storage must now handle AI/ML pipelines, analytics, content creation, life sciences, and enterprise files on the same infrastructure.

Modern platforms offering high-density flash as an option run software-defined in AWS and Azure, providing hybrid storage without the headache. Subscription models deliver the same tools both on-premises and in the cloud.

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Those platforms that handle block, file, and containers on unified platforms will win out. Smart QLC implementation adds more value to these unified platforms because enterprises can automatically promote hot data to SLC or MLC while demoting cold data to QLC where necessary.

So QLC makes compliance affordable, and enterprise data storage more manageable. According to Dell, high-density NVMe plus QLC cuts energy bills 54% versus old arrays.

QLC's bad reputation is stuck in 2015. Today's gear handles production loads at prices that make the finance department happy. As the hunger for AI storage grows and compliance requirements multiply, QLC delivers capacity and control without compromise. It's time to stop counting flash cells and start taking advantage of high-density storage that delivers on enterprise AI needs.