Issue link: https://insights.oneneck.com/i/1437687
26 Storage Types There are a number of different types of storage. The primary storage alternatives available today are legacy tiered-storage arrays, hybrid flash arrays, and all-flash arrays. Each alternative takes a different approach to providing performance and capacity to workloads. Within each alternative, vendors take different approaches in building their offerings, so a brief explanation of each is listed below. Legacy Tiered Architectures These are the legacy enterprise arrays that have been used for server-based workloads for the last 10-20 years. They are typically dual controller-based architectures, and within the last decade, have been modified to allow for multiple tiers of performance and capacity disks to be included in the architecture. Different tiers of disks are provided to try and service the capacity and performance demands of dispersed workloads. There are two options in this approach: you can design for performance by creating dedicated pools of high performing disks for a workload, but this can be very expensive and limiting. The other option is to try and take advantage of tiering that was added to this architecture to ask the array to promote or demote blocks of data based upon demand. The trouble with this auto-tiering is that it often takes too much time to make those decisions for VDI workloads. All-Flash All-flash storage arrays are entirely made up of flash-based storage. There are many different types of flash that can be used within these storage arrays. Modern all-flash arrays were designed to take advantage of the characteristics of flash storage, meaning that the operating system and file system were designed with flash in mind. Some products have taken a legacy array design and simply replaced the spinning disks with all flash. While this is still faster than the older option, the final product was not designed for this purpose.