Last week I happened to come across an interesting articles that, E-bay has moved their data center as Flash memory based storage system and data operation. Awesome! I am trying to conceive the technical challenges at implementation and also the storage medium hurdles due its complex nature and data volume.

Flash Memory: The usage of flash memory become significantly popular among current generation and key element in electronic media for years, while consider to powering the storage of USB memory drives, hand held devices and between other data transfer tools.

As evolving trend, flash memory driven data storage mediums entering into data centers sphere, and taking new form in that orbit. As you aware, data centers plays crucial role at enterprise business model, to serve central data communication and also functions as data backup recovery system.

What Makes Interesting? Heading towards flash memory driven data centers has huge benefits, but on the other hand, highly expensive models and also very fragile to handle. When considering faster data transport and high end technical factors, flash memory stands out rather hard drive driven data storage. Computer processors techniques growing very rapidly, and new generation series keep coming at every quarter, with new features and upgraded concepts.

The issue is, communication speed does matter between hard drives and processors, because of hard drives consists mechanical parts. Flash memory entirely involves semiconductor driven operation, and data transport undoubtedly more faster than mechanical hard drive, since it doesn’t carry out speed rotating disk heads and no other mechanical moving components.

According to Gartner’s – industries lead research, The global flash memory market growing rapidly in past years, and looks this ratio expected to increase exponentially in next 5-10 years. Flash memory based storage system maker’s keep an close eye at data center segment, for its potential market and technical growth. Besides, we can positively point out new generation consumer electronics has huge market for flash memory driven devices and equipments.

Key Benefits: There are several key advantages, significantly related to performance, heat, I/O time interval, hardware space management, rugged architecture and so on. These are vital elements to maintain data centers.

At data center, hard drive based mechanical operation often tend to lose its performance, where each access to data need to wait for the disk head to rotate, the result will lead to I/O crisis in storage system.

Also, when consider power outage and reboots stand point, flash memory driven operation are more consistent while you compare RAM on High end servers and personal computers (PC)

E-Bay, countries Largest online business firm who has already deployed its data centers as flash memory driven storage system, almost 100 Terabytes. Per industry critics, this is one of largest implementation under flash memory based data storage at data centers domain.

Challenges for data center: The key challenges at IT segment would be, addressing the need of flash memory storage system for suitable applications with the team involvement of IT business managers and networking engineers.Some of business applications might very well-suited at flash memory based storage system, while others might see very little performance benefit.

For instance, If you hold online business model similar to Amazon, E bay, social networking environment or heavy traffic e-commerce site, then the probability to get enter flash memory based data centers would help extraordinarily, since the I/O transaction time does matter.

Basically, The effect and need of flash memory based storage systems on data centers should be determined by the sensitivity of your applications.

The transaction and time interval sensitivity does plays the primal role to determine the improvement of storage performance and need of flash memory driven data centers.

Let’s welcome the new generation of data storage system which will surely lay down the technical path more wider to take the world to next-gen computing experience.

Global players at Flash memory storage system:

• Fusion-Io Inc
• Violin Memory Inc
• Nimble Storage Inc – Hybrid system
• San-disk – Associates with Pliant Technology
• EMC Corp
• Xiotech Corp – Hybrid flash and hard drive storage system
• Tintri