PRO+ Premium Content/Storage

Not long ago, a major hardware vendor invited me to participate in a group chat where we would explore the case for flash storage and software-defined storage. On the list of questions sent in advance was that burning issue: Has flash killed disk? Against my better judgment, I accepted the offer. Opinions being elbows, I figured I had a couple to contribute. I joined a couple of notable commentators from the vendor's staff and the analyst community, who I presumed would echo the talking points of their client like overzealous high school cheerleaders. I wasn't wrong. Shortly after it started, I found myself drifting from the nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) flash storage party line. I also noted that software-defined storage (SDS) futures weren't high and to the right in the companies I was visiting, despite projections by one analyst of 30%-plus growth rates over the next couple years. Serious work remained to be done to improve the predictability, manageability and orchestration of software-defined and hyper-converged storage...