Testing An All Flash Array

Building an All Flash Arrays (AFA) is different, the aspect of what it is trying to solve is also different, the big promise using flash array is the predictive performance nature of it, consistent performance and if you lucky with your array vendor, providing enterprise features such as a true scale-out, inline deduplication, unique RAID algorithm is also included.

On the surface the different arrays may look similar, at the end of the day, they contain either Flash Drives or Flash PCIe card.

Wrong!

the confusion surrounding this area is so vast that is somewhat hard to see the forest from the trees, different vendors publish “hero” numbers (performance numbers that can exist only under very specific set of conditions, e.g, they do NOT simulate the REAL WORLD), vendors often try to disguise their weakness points and as such will make claims that feature A,B or C cannot be done etc`

Time to change this

AFA’s needs to be evaluated differently, they need to agree on a specifc set of criterais, think something like SPC-1 for Hybrid Arrays but not just for the highest performance

IDC have recently published a white paper that describe some of the aspects that needs to be evaluated before choosing the right storage vendor