All-flash solutions are not "outliers"
I appreciate Scott's perspective and agree that hybrid storage solutions will work fine for many applications that are not performance (IOPS) constrained. Where I would tend to disagree is along 2 fronts. One is that the need for all-flash is an "outlier" case. I agree that few environments need 1M+ IOPS, but the number of environments that can significantly benefit from a solution that delivers 50K, 100K or even 200K IOPS are not outliers and represent a very large segment of the storage market. Today's hybrids can't provide this level of performance. A good example is VDI. If you only are enabling less than 200 VDI users, yes a hybrid may work ok, but to guarantee performance for 200+ user environments, an all-flash solution may be mandatory, especially for persistent desktop environments. The 2nd area of disagreement is on cost per GB. All-flash devices with significant useable capacity for the mid-market can be acquired for well under $50K. The prices of flash devices are coming down dramatically, much faster than HDDs. Some flash vendors already claim they offer the same $/GB of HDDs. It's blatantly clear that HDDs will be going the way of vacuum tubes for I/O-intensive apps. We can debate the timing, but hybrid solutions are interim solutions at best. A better and less disruptive approach is to add an all-flash device (like ViSX from Astute Networks where I work) into an existing I/O intensive environment as a complementary solution to an existing traditional storage environment. Just move those applications or virtual machine datastores to the all-flash device (typically in a matter of minutes with Storage vMotion) and users can see an immediate 5X-10X performance boost without having to replace their existing storage systems.
