I hope the title of this blog post may have piqued your interest!
I’ve spoken many times about how I predict the demise of Tier 1 storage due to the impact of All Flash Arrays, this is good for NetApp and here’s why…
Whilst we power some of the most critical applications in the most critical environments across the world, I don’t personally think we’ve ever truly been seen as Tier 1, in fact EMC in particular have enjoyed re-enforcing this at every possible opportunity. For several years now I would have argued against this, I would have argued that we do in fact meet most peoples’ requirements for Tier 1 storage, but now I have a different view. When I hear EMC say we’re not Tier 1, I say “Good! Tier 1 is dead, dead, dead” if your definition of Tier 1 has performance and capacity high on the list, then traditional Tier 1 arrays such as VMAX do neither of these particularly well, it’s incredibly expensive for a capacity tier and with the performance we get from Flash, it’s also hugely expensive and not really appropriate as a performance Tier.
This post wasn’t intended to be critical of the technology, VMAX is a very clever beast, but the world has changed, there are more technology choices today than ever before and you should always question whether continuing down the path you’re on is actually the right path.
The evolution of Tier 1 is a market opportunity that lends itself really well to NetApp technologies, with our Scale Out Hybrid arrays powered by cDOT making a great balanced performance and capacity Tier. Our All Flash FAS and EF arrays for an extreme high performance Tier, with all the data management tools and integrations that are essential for protecting critical applications.
Here’s the video!