- Cost, Flexibility Increase Virtualization’s Health IT Appeal
- Pure Storage Upgrades Flash Array for Healthcare Analytics
Flash-based arrays also don’t need the same cooling process as standard drives, making the cost of the data center much less expensive. Many flash-based arrays also include data replication, deduplication, and snapshots for recovery purposes.
According to an IDC AFA presentation, AFA is required for organizations looking to embrace technology with high volume data sets, such as big data analytics. IDC states that hard disc drives (HDDs) can’t meet taxing requirements cost-effectively. Flash is needed to maintain an environment as IT infrastructure density increases.
Over the past several years, most enterprise AFA deployments were specific for a single application, according to IDC. The most popular AFA deployments are for databases or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments.
IDC stated that all of the AFA customers they spoke to said that they were satisfied with the technology and are interested in moving more workloads to flash in the coming years.
AFAs have potential to offer organizations a quick way to get back up and running in the event of an outage. Healthcare organizations are especially vulnerable to service outages and need a primary storage solution that will successfully and quickly duplicate data to get applications back up and running.
Clinicians use digital tools to gain access to patient records and other critical information. The inability to constantly access that information during a service outage can put patients at risk. AFAs can handle the heavy workloads associated with disaster recovery.
IDC advised that organizations consider the future use of their storage infrastructure when considering AFA.
“All systems can deliver extremely high performance and low latency for a single application, but a system's ability to support key multitenant features should be considered for customers that plan to host multiple workloads, thereby maximizing the return on investment (ROI) that derives from the secondary economic benefits of flash deployment at scale,” IDC authors advised. “IDC believes that mixed workload consolidation is the future of AFAs and, by 2019, they will dominate primary storage spend in the enterprise.”
Flash based storage already has a place in the healthcare industry when it comes to data heavy workloads, such as unstructured data and images.
Organizations deploying big data analytics solutions need a storage option that can handle all the unstructured data collected from images, audio files, and text documents. Entities that don’t currently have an analytics solution in place, but plan to deploy one in the future, can benefit by readying their data center now so it will be ready for the future influx of data.
AFA technology also assist with data intensive healthcare research. For example, researchers at UC Berkeley use Pure Storage FlashBlade to deal with massive sets of genomic data that need elastic storage space.
UC Berkeley needed a storage solution that could quickly retrieve high-quality images so researchers could visualize their research and find patterns.
UC Berkeley's Center for Computational Biology Professor Anthony D. Joseph explained that the flash-based array storage removed roadblocks from their research by allowing them to see more detail faster.
UC Berkeley researches data and shares the information with healthcare organizations so clinicians can make better and more accurate diagnoses.
An advanced storage solution is the foundation for future data-intensive healthcare digitization. Modern storage solutions using more advanced methods for data retrieval, such as flash and solid-state drives, can help organizations quickly make use of their data. This can lead to faster results for real-time analysis and diagnosis.