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All-flash storage arrays are very fast, with only one level of performance in the product.
To ensure the array can also provide the capacity required for the design at an affordable
price, you should look for arrays that offer deduplication and compression. While
nearly every modern all-flash array is easier to manage than their legacy counterparts,
they don't always offer the same ease of management and per-VM management
that many of the hybrid flash offerings do.
Hybrid Flash
Hybrid storage arrays are modern architectures that were designed to efficiently use a
combination of flash drives and spinning disks. Vendors have taken different architecture
approaches on how they use capacity and performance in their arrays, but the end
results are similar. They are all able to offer impressive performance from a smaller
amount of flash, while still providing a large amount of capacity by storing data on
large spinning disks in the array. Ideal hybrid storage architecture alternatives use
built-in intelligence to automatically tier data across flash and disk drives based on
demand, eliminating the need for manual tuning and potential performance pitfalls.
The architectures that are the best fit for a modern VDI design are hybrid and all flash
storage architectures. These architectures are capable of providing the performance
required for VDI environments and typically also offer the modern management
experiences discussed earlier. VDI workloads are very unpredictable by nature, and
if your storage solution must wait to make storage decisions or promote blocks to a
caching tier, the performance demand will be long gone before that happens and the
experience will have been negatively affected.
Flash
