Solid-State Array Supports Future Health IT Infrastructure

July 19, 2017 - Solid-state array (SSA) storage is growing in healthcare as organizations seek scalable and flexible storage options for increasingly digitized health IT infrastructure.

Gartner predicted in its 2017 magic quadrant for SSAs that SSA performance will improve drastically, doubling in density and cost-effectiveness, within the next year.

Gartner also predicted that 50 percent of data centers will use SSAs for high-performance computing and big data workloads by 2021.

SSA is made up of multiple solid-state disk drives that are more stable than the spinning disks found in hard disk drives. The flash drives transfer data faster than hard disk drives and are easier to reprogram.

SSAs are also cheaper to physically deploy and maintain. Without the spinning disks, the array does not need as much power to run.

SSAs 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.

SSAs are becoming more appealing to healthcare organizations because their price continues to drop, making them not only a scalable and flexible storage option, but an affordable one as well.

Gartner reported that the overall SSA market grew 72 percent in 2016 and prices dropped 40 percent in the last 18 months.

“Together with the inclusive software, upgrade, reliability and effective capacity guarantees, these factors continue to make SSAs a convincing value proposition,” stated Gartner analysts. “Most of the traditional incumbent and system vendors have transitioned their overall storage array businesses to SSAs, where more than 50 percent of new storage array sales are SSAs.”

SSAs are also more future-proof than other forms of storage and adapt well to rapidly evolving IT infrastructure.

“Many IT departments are still moving to their first solid-state array, while the products and technology improvements change faster than customers can adapt their storage infrastructures,” said Gartner. “SSA development and change continue at a very fast rate. The ability of SSAs to share data between many applications and servers without the requirement to move data or storage, or to create islands of isolated storage, has improved data center agility.” 

SSA software is becoming faster due in part to Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). Gartner predicted that the inclusion of NVMe in SSDs will increase exponentially over the next year.

NVMe is a new language protocol aimed at replacing SAS and SATA standards for solid state storage. The technology reduces delays caused by data bottlenecks and moving high volumes of data within existing flash storage systems. It does so by simultaneously processing data across a network of devices.

IBM announced the development of its NVMe back in May, which will lower IT infrastructure latencies and prevent data transfer delay.

“The NVMe strategy is based on optimizing the entire storage system stack - from applications requiring the data to flash technology to store it,” IBM said in a statement. “Through the development of its FlashSystem family of all-flash storage solutions, IBM recognized that multiple technologies would be required to address the demands of ultra-low latency data processing.”

Healthcare organizations are looking to leverage the data they collect for analytics at the point of care, which is why data processing speeds and flexible storage solutions are so critical to future health IT infrastructure.

The speed at which data can be retrieved, processed, and used determines the success of technology that will help clinicians communicate with and diagnose patients at the point of care.

Real-time analytics and edge computing depend on data processing speeds. Real-time analytics and edge computing allow clinicians to collect and analyze data at the point of care. This increases patient care because it lowers the chance the patient will need to come back to get results. It also assists clinicians in making more informed decisions at the point of care.

Healthcare organizations digitizing their IT infrastructure and embracing data heavy initiatives, such as analytics, need a storage solution that will support heavy workloads and scale to meet future demands.