Flash tech a must for IT industry

RITIKA SHARMA / Emirates Business

For regional businesses looking to digitally transform, the idea of an all-flash data center has become a practical reality, regional IT experts opine. However, the demand for the technology remains high, regional players are citing ‘cost’ as a major barrier in the adoption of this technology.
Regional experts voice that it is high time companies rethink their data centres and look at the substantial benefits that come with the Flash.
“All-flash data center is a good way of doing away with the need for complex storage systems. In addition, it also makes more efficient use of the storage medium as provisioning, compression and duplication can be carried out easily without affecting performance,” Ravinder Ahuja, senior QA engineer, Techworld, told Emirates Business.
“A necessary restructure of storage system is necessary to break away from the various problems that we face today regarding storage. The traditional storage systems that support the data centers today need large caches and small working sets to operate effectively which is cumbersome, inefficient and very costly. All-flash storage is a perfect solution to all these,” he added.
There is a good demand for Flash in UAE. A recent survey by NetApp states that 90 percent of respondents admitted there was a need for Flash within their businesses and that IT decision makers from medium sized businesses are the strongest advocates of Flash, with 94 percent agreeing that ‘a lack of need for Flash solutions’ is not a barrier to Flash adoption.
Talking about the challenges in the adoption process, Fadi Kanafani, Regional Director Middle East & Africa, NetApp said in an official statement, “Despite the introduction of new high capacity drives and downward pricing trends of Flash technologies, our research shows that there is still work to be done to educate business leaders on the true value of Flash.”
“We are working to remove the barriers and risk to Flash adoption, so customers can realise the promise of an All-Flash data center, simply and cost-effectively,” he added.