Flash-Based Storage 101: What VARs Need To Know

By Jeff Aaron, VP of Marketing PernixData

Q: Can you briefly highlight the differences between flash-based and storage on disk drives?

Disk drives are mechanical rotational devices where access to data means seeking to the correct sector and reading/writing. As you can imagine, accessing data on disk that is located randomly can result in huge amounts of overhead. Flash, on the other hand, is not spindle-based and therefore doesn't incur the penalties associated with disk while accessing data. The performance characteristics of flash are therefore much better than disks.

While disk capacities have grown tremendously, their performance characteristics remain unchanged. This means that they have become ill-suited for virtualized environments where performance requirements have grown quite rapidly.

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