The Business Value of SolidFire All-Flash Array Storage Systems

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1 Sponsored by: SolidFire Authors: Eric Burgener Matthew Marden April 2016 The Business Value of SolidFire All-Flash Array Storage Systems EXECUTIVE SUMMARY All-flash arrays (AFAs) are transforming enterprise storage not only with their performance but also with their ability to enable both IT infrastructure and business transformation. With their ability to consistently deliver sub-millisecond response times in the face of varying workloads and handle hundreds of thousands to millions of input/output operations per second (IOPS), AFAs are much better suited to the workloads of today than legacy hard disk drive (HDD) based storage infrastructure. Often in the IT Business Value Highlights Three-year ROI 385% Total three-year benefits $3.13M Payback 5 months Additional revenue per year per SolidFire node $78,800 Higher productivity for impacted users 7% Less IT staff time to keep the lights on 41% Less SLA-related fines 72% industry, additional performance is assumed to come with additional cost, but against performanceintensive primary storage workloads, AFAs are offering significantly better business value than enterprise arrays that use only HDDs. IDC interviewed seven organizations using SolidFire AFA storage systems to support their performancedependent business operations. These organizations indicated that they have leveraged SolidFire to improve their business prospects by cost-effectively delivering scalable, high performing IT and cloud services offerings, while also lowering business, administrative and infrastructure costs by $147,700 per node (on average).. As a result, IDC projects that these organizations will realize an average three-year return on investment (ROI) of 385% with SolidFire by:» Winning more business through improved performance of IT and cloud services» Being better able to meet customer needs of performance, reliability and scalability for internal users, enterprise customers, and IT and cloud service customers.» Increasing employee productivity levels through improved systems and application performance» Requiring less IT staff time to maintain storage environments and support storage users» Reducing the impact of storage-related problems and meeting higher percentage of service-level agreements (SLAs)» Having SolidFire serve as a cost-effective AFA solution Document #US IDC. Page 1

2 Situation Overview Datacenter computing has undergone a significant change over the past 10 years, bringing the industry into a new era that IDC refers to as 3rd Platform computing. This new era is built around new technologies (such as virtual infrastructure, cloud, and flash storage media) and hosts a mix of legacy applications (such as relational database, file sharing, and messaging and collaboration platforms) and next-generation applications (such as mobile computing, social media, and big data/analytics). The workload mix in 3rd Platform computing has significantly changed I/O profiles, placing demands on storage infrastructure that HDDs and legacy architectures cannot cost effectively handle. This has given rise to a new set of storage architectures that leverage flash to meet today s stringent storage performance requirements. When AFAs were first introduced, they were generally deployed as dedicated application platforms for a single, extremely performance-intensive application. Over the past six years, however, the arrays have matured in terms of availability and manageability, flash costs have dropped significantly, and AFAs have increasingly evolved toward becoming generalpurpose computing platforms with the data services necessary to accommodate the dense consolidation of mixed mission-critical workloads. All customers that deploy AFAs plan to move more workloads to AFAs over time as legacy equipment is retired or new applications are brought online. AFAs are broadly used for legacy applications such as relational databases, file shares, enterprise resource planning, and messaging and collaboration applications and even more intensely used for next-generation applications in the mobile computing, social media, and big data/analytics arenas. The widespread use of flash storage not only has met 3rd Platform computing storage requirements but also has led to a broad range of transformational technical and business outcomes. Flash has always been known for its performance, but other characteristics of flash deployment at scale, such as improved reliability, far smaller storage infrastructures that require significantly less energy and floor space, and increased server efficiencies that reduce required server counts and software licensing costs, are opening up new opportunities for businesses to increase revenue generation, lower infrastructure costs, redesign datacenter workflows for improved efficiencies, and pursue new markets and customers. In 2015, AFAs represented a $2.58 billion market. The AFA market is one of the highest-growth market segments in enterprise storage and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.6% over the next four years (through 2019) as enterprises replace aging storage infrastructures with flash-optimized platforms. These platforms are required to deliver the performance and agility that today s much more dynamic business model demands. CIOs are increasingly committing to an all-flash datacenter for primary storage Document #US IDC. Page 2

3 strategy over time, reaping the advantages of smaller storage infrastructures that consume less energy and floor space and offer improved device-level reliability (solid state storage versus spinning disks). IDC expects that, by 2019, AFAs will be hosting 60 70% of all primary storage. Solidfire Founded in 2010, SolidFire is a Boulder, Colorado based AFA vendor whose initial platform became generally available in late Dave Wright, SolidFire s founder and CEO, had a strong background with service providers and had seen firsthand how difficult and expensive it was to try and meet storage requirements in cloud environments with traditional storage architectures built around spinning disks. Wright founded SolidFire with the objective of building an enterprise-class storage platform that better met the needs of the Web-scale environments that were hosting more and more enterprise applications. SolidFire developed an all-flash platform built around a scale-out storage architecture that was simple and easy to expand, included the quality-of-service (QoS) controls necessary to consistently deliver to defined SLAs in the face of unpredictable workloads, and provided the granular, enterpriseclass management capabilities to securely administer dense, multitenant environments. SolidFire initially targeted the service provider market where its platforms were heavily used for mixed workload consolidation. SolidFire s storage systems ran at rates of utilization, driven by service providers desire to hone the efficiency and cost of their IT infrastructures, higher than those of other AFAs on the market. While other vendors AFAs were being deployed for dedicated application use at very low rates of overall utilization, SolidFire s customers were reaping the benefits of flash deployment at scale to move to smaller, more efficient storage infrastructures that delivered consistent sub-millisecond performance, used less energy and floor space, were more reliable than spinning disks, and drove higher rates of server utilization to lower compute and software licensing costs. In September 2014, after establishing a strong reputation for itself in the service provider space, SolidFire also began to sell into the commercial enterprise market. SolidFire has been successful in both segments, and by the end of 2015, enterprises accounted for over 50% of SolidFire s revenue because the company continued to grow overall at almost three times the rate of the AFA market itself. SolidFire s storage platform, the SF series, offers a full set of enterprise-class data services, which include thin provisioning, snapshots, clones, inline data reduction (compression and deduplication), encryption, replication, QoS (the company s classic strength), and rich integration points with VMware vsphere, OpenStack, CloudStack, and Flexiant environments. SolidFire s scalability is unmatched by other vendors AFA platforms, with an ability to support Document #US IDC. Page 3

4 up to 7.5 million IOPS, multiple petabytes of effective storage capacity (taking inline data reduction into account), up to 50GBps of overall bandwidth, and 100 1U nodes. SolidFire s ability to just add nodes as a business grows, automatically and transparently redistributing workloads across available resources, increases administrative productivity, while the company s ability to accommodate new technology generations in the same cluster gives customers more options for staying abreast of the latest technology developments. The Business Value Of Solidfire Study Demographics TABLE 1 IDC interviewed seven organizations that have deployed SolidFire as an AFA storage solution. These SolidFire customers not only were weighted toward the service provider space but also represented the experiences of the enterprise sector and government. In deploying SolidFire, the organizations generally shared the common objective of ensuring the performance and scalability of key services and applications. For the most part, these organizations added SolidFire to their datacenter environments rather than using it to replace existing storage resources. Table 1 shows that the organizations had deployed an average of nine SolidFire nodes with 130TB of effective storage capacity at the time the interview was conducted, and on average, SolidFire constituted somewhat less than one-quarter of their overall storage environments. Four of the interviewed organizations are based in the United States, and the remaining interviewees are based in Australia, South Africa, and Jersey (off the coast of France). Demographics of Interviewed Organizations Average Range Number of employees ,500 Number of IT staff Number of IT users ,500 Number of business applications Number of TBs (total IT environment) ,000 Number of SolidFire nodes Number of TB (SolidFire environment) Countries Industries United States, Australia, South Africa, and Jersey (off the coast of France) Cloud services provider, application services provider, government, shipping, and architecture Source: IDC, 2016 Document #US IDC. Page 4

5 Migration to SolidFire As is common with most customers that purchase an AFA, SolidFire customers interviewed for this study had concluded that managing application performance to their customers expectations with traditional storage platforms was becoming increasingly difficult and expensive and thus were looking to newer storage architectures that leverage flash to help them address this issue. Performance issues were the key driving factor in SolidFire purchases (as they are for most AFAs), but SolidFire s particular ability to deliver guaranteed performance levels in the face of growing and unpredictable workloads (because of the company s industry-leading QoS controls) is considered the critical competitive differentiator among most of its customers. The storage performance and capacity expansion necessary to keep up with the high growth rates of successful businesses loomed large as well, marking easy platform scalability as a key purchase driver for most of SolidFire s customers in both the service provider market and the commercial enterprise market. SolidFire customers interviewed for this study repeatedly referenced performance and scalability as driving their AFA vendor selection:» Guaranteed performance: As an IT director at Immedion, a datacenter and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider, explained, The most significant benefit of SolidFire is that we re able to guarantee consistent performance of our cloud services to our customers.» Scalability: As a cloud services provider noted, Before SolidFire, we struggled to keep up with our customers changes because of expanding resource requirements. With SolidFire, every time you add a node, you add compute so when you add redundancy, you re also adding compute. Most of the customers interviewed for this study added the SolidFire platform to their existing storage infrastructure. Moving their most performance-intensive applications to SolidFire allowed their legacy storage platforms (which most retained) to perform better for the less performance-intensive applications that continued to run on them. The addition of SolidFire drove transformations not only on the IT operations side (improving administrative productivity for routine tasks such as provisioning, storage performance tuning, and system expansion) but also on the business side (leading to increased revenue generation, improved customer service, competitive differentiation, and the ability to offer services that allowed SolidFire customers to pursue new markets and customers). All study participants planned to move more workloads to the SolidFire platform over time, and nearly all the study participants felt that the industry would move to an all-flash datacenter for primary storage strategy within a few short years. Document #US IDC. Page 5

6 Business Value Analysis SolidFire customers reported to IDC that they have leveraged the SolidFire AFA solution to better position their businesses and benefit from operational efficiencies. As a result, IDC calculates that these organizations will record business benefits worth an average of $147,700 per SolidFire node per year over three years ($1.31 million per organization) in the following areas (see Figure 1):» Business productivity benefits: Being able to guarantee performance levels and offer services demanded by their customer bases enables SolidFire organizations to win more business. Meanwhile, improved application performance increases the productivity levels of certain groups of employees. IDC puts the value of higher operating margin and employee productivity attributable to SolidFire at an average of $82,900 per SolidFire node per year over three years ($733,800 per organization).» IT staff productivity benefits: Requiring minimal time to deploy, maintain, and support makes IT staff operations more efficient and productive. IDC calculates that these organizations will realize IT staff efficiencies worth an annual average of $54,100 per SolidFire node over three years ($479,600 per organization).» Risk mitigation user productivity benefits: Ensuring resilient and high-performance services and applications helps organizations meet more SLAs and experience less storagerelated downtime. IDC projects these improvements will have a value worth an average of $9,200 per SolidFire node per year over three years ($81,900 per organization).» IT infrastructure cost reductions: Reducing certain datacenter costs, including cost for servers, power, and floor space, helps interviewed organizations realize cost savings. IDC projects that these organizations will save an average of $1,500 per SolidFire node per year over three years ($12,900 per organization). FIGURE 1 Average Annual Benefits per SolidFire Node ($) 160, , , ,000 80,000 60,000 40,000 20,000 0 $82,900 Business productivity benefits $54,100 IT staff productivity benefits $9,200 Risk mitigation user productivity benefits $1,500 IT infrastructure cost reductions Source: IDC, 2016 Average annual benefits per SolidFire node: $147,700 Document #US IDC. Page 6

7 TABLE 2 Business Productivity Benefits Revenue impact Per Organization Additional revenue per year $698,000 $78,800 Assumed operating margin 15% Net operating margin gain per year $105,000 $11,800 Enhanced performance Number of users impacted Average productivity gain impacted users 7% 7% Average productive hours per impacted user per year gained Equivalent FTE gain 9 1 Per SolidFire Node Source: IDC, 2016 Impact on Business All commercial organizations interviewed for this study either attributed additional revenue to their deployment of SolidFire or believe that the deployment of SolidFire will enable them to capture more revenue going forward. Those organizations that have already seen an impact with SolidFire will realize an average of $78,800 per SolidFire node per year ($698,000 per organization) in additional revenue. SolidFire has supported the ability of the organizations to win, support, and retain their customers by providing the levels of performance, flexibility, and reliability required from their storage systems. IT managers at interviewed organizations, particularly service providers, described the persistent and evolving challenge of meeting their customers needs and cited SolidFire as a major contributor to their success in expanding their businesses. The ability of the organizations to guarantee performance levels, provide services such as encryption, and scale their storage infrastructures to meet business growth with SolidFire has been a differentiator. A service provider commented on how SolidFire figures into its growth efforts, When we talk to potential clients about what we can do, out of the six main points we stress, half of them relate to capabilities of SolidFire. So it has a very direct positive impact on our ability to sell our services. We just closed a deal and the ability to guarantee performance and encryption was the reason we won the business. Document #US IDC. Page 7

8 Interviewed organizations provided other examples of how SolidFire improves their business prospects:» Guaranteed performance levels. Several interviewed organizations mentioned being able to guarantee service performance levels with SolidFire as critical to their business prospects. The CTO at RSAWEB, an Internet service provider in South Africa, explained, [T]he main benefit of SolidFire is that we can cast the net wider and attract more customers who may not be considering hosting their workloads. However, by being able to guarantee a very high level of performance, we believe that we can attract those prospects.» Support cloud services. A cloud service provider noted that only SolidFire could support its operations, We looked at other solid state storage offerings, and everything came back to the fact that they weren t designed for the cloud, which was the major decision point for us in choosing SolidFire.» Support additional services. A service provider explained how it is leveraging SolidFire to offer incremental services, With SolidFire, we re able to run bigger reports in a shorter amount of time frame without bottlenecks. So if customers want the history of all of their transactions with us, we can now do it, whereas before it might have timed out. So now we re starting to charge for that type of functionality.» Reduce impact of noisy neighbors. The CTO at Richard Fleischman and Associates (RFA), a United States based IT services provider, commented, We ve reduced the impact of problem areas with SolidFire. We have multiple clients with identical systems that create massive peaks and resource pressure, and SolidFire has helped us to eliminate this problem. This has played a role in our being able to capture substantial additional revenue. Improved Operations SolidFire customers are also more operationally efficient with SolidFire supporting key workloads and applications. For these organizations, the same qualities that improve business prospects performance, scalability, and reliability result in improved application performance, savings, and enhanced capabilities. SolidFire customers were unanimous in praising SolidFire s performance. As one organization said, There s been improved performance on all applications, across the board, while the CTO at RFA reported, There s been a positive impact on all of our applications that require high performance. As Figure 2 demonstrates, interviewed organizations have recorded significant improvements in storage performance with SolidFire. Document #US IDC. Page 8

9 For interviewed organizations, the performance and reliability of SolidFire translate to employee time savings and efficiencies. They provided a number of examples:» Improved application performance. The interviewed governmental organization attributed productivity gains of up to 20% for certain employees as the result of much improved performance of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and Web-based applications.» Enhanced application capabilities. A service provider reported up to 10% higher productivity for individuals using applications to record and report on its environment because SolidFire supports higher performance and capabilities.» Application development efficiencies. Several organizations reported shortening their application development life cycles with SolidFire, thanks to its scalability, and another organization cited its ability to perform load testing with SolidFire as a benefit for its developers. FIGURE 2 Storage Performance Improvements with SolidFire Average input/ output operations per second Random data Read performance throughput speed (MBps) (GBps) Write performance (MBps) Transactions per minute (TPM) Average Latency (milliseconds) Source: IDC, 2016 IT Staff Efficiencies Interviewed organizations also reported that deploying SolidFire has helped them make their IT operations more efficient. These SolidFire customers reported that they are achieving time savings as a result of the ease of deploying, maintaining, and managing their SolidFire environments. One interviewed organization indicated that SolidFire s nodebased architecture enabled it to deploy and scale its storage environments more efficiently. As a result, interviewed organizations reported needing 41% less IT staff time to keep the Document #US IDC. Page 9

10 lights on, freeing up time to work on other initiatives and to support business growth. One organization explained the benefit to its business of using SolidFire as follows: I d say we now spend half our time keeping the lights on with SolidFire, whereas before we were spending 80% of our time keeping the lights on. With the time that we re saving, we are spending more time on strategy and creating value for the business. Another organization cited benefits in the ease of deploying SolidFire: The ease of deploying SolidFire increases our margins because we don t have to pay staff to deploy a new array, which takes them away from doing other things, so I keep my overhead down. In addition to day-to-day efficiencies, SolidFire reduces the frequency of problems, for both internal users and customers, which means that less IT staff or help desk time is spent supporting these parties (84% less time on average). Figure 3 shows other IT staff efficiencies being achieved with SolidFire in areas such as incident response (76%), storage administration (47%), backup and disaster recovery (DR) (35%), and storage deployment (32%). FIGURE 3 IT Staff Efficiencies with SolidFire Call center support Incident response Storage administration Day-to-day operations Backup and disaster recovery Storage deployment Source: IDC, 2016 Risk Mitigation User Productivity Benefits Interviewed organizations also reported minimizing operational and business interruptions caused by storage-related outages and better meeting SLAs since deploying SolidFire. The impact in terms of unplanned downtime on internal users is substantial in a relative sense, with interviewed organizations experiencing almost no loss of productive time from SolidFirerelated storage outages. Document #US IDC. Page 10

11 TABLE 3 Because a number of interviewed customers are service providers, SolidFire s resiliency and reliability in terms of supporting customers and meeting SLAs are of greater impact for them. In addition to improved service reliability and performance, interviewed organizations also reported that they are able to meet a higher percentage of their SLAs, which reduces the fines or penalties they must pay for breaching SLAs by an average of more than $80,000 per year per organization (see Table 3). In particular, interviewed organizations mentioned their ability to guarantee quality of service and use multitenancy to create separate environments for customers as benefits of SolidFire. Risk Mitigation Unplanned Downtime and SLAs Before SolidFire With SolidFire Difference Benefit (%) Unplanned downtime Number of instances per year MTTR (hours) Productive hours lost per IT user per year Equivalent FTEs SLAs Percentage of SLAs met Cost per SLA percentage not met ($) 14,810 14,810 SLA fines per year ($) 114,330 32,580 81, Source: IDC, 2016 IT Infrastructure Cost Reductions Because interviewed organizations are mostly using SolidFire in an additive fashion rather than as a replacement for other storage hardware, they are realizing relatively minimal cost savings. Nonetheless, interviewed SolidFire customers described it as a cost-effective solution for meeting their storage infrastructure needs. In particular, organizations attributed efficiencies in servers, power, and floor space to SolidFire as they have used it to support key business applications. Document #US IDC. Page 11

12 ROI Analysis IDC interviewed seven organizations using SolidFire and recorded their results to inform this study s analysis. IDC used the following three-step method for conducting the ROI analysis:» Gathered quantitative benefit information during the interviews using a beforeand-after assessment. In this study, the benefits included staff time savings and productivity gains, user productivity increases, increased revenue, and device-related cost reductions.» Created a complete investment (three-year total cost analysis) profile based on the interviews. Investments go beyond the annual costs of using SolidFire and can include additional costs related to the solution, including migrations, planning, consulting, configuration or maintenance, and staff or user training.» Calculated the ROI and payback period. IDC conducted a depreciated cash flow analysis of the benefits and investments for the organizations using SolidFire over a threeyear period. ROI is the ratio of the net present value (NPV) and the discounted investment. The payback period is the point at which cumulative benefits equal the initial investment. Table 4 presents IDC s analysis of the average discounted benefits, average discounted investment, and return on investment for the SolidFire customers interviewed for this study. IDC projects that these organizations will invest a discounted average of $73,000 per SolidFire node over three years ($650,000 per organization) and realize three-year discounted business benefits of $353,700 per SolidFire node ($3.13 million per organization). This would result in an average three-year ROI of 385% for these organizations, with breakeven in their investment in SolidFire occurring in just over five months. TABLE 4 Business Productivity Benefits Per Organization Per SolidFire Node Discounted benefit $3.13 million $353,700 Discounted investment $0.65 million $73,000 Net present value (NPV) $2.48 million $280,700 Return on investment (ROI) 385% 385% Payback period 5 months 5 months Discount rate 12% 12% Source: IDC, 2016 Document #US IDC. Page 12

13 Case Studies Immedion is a cloud and datacenter services provider with locations in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Ohio. Immedion Immedion is a cloud and datacenter services provider with locations in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Ohio. As a cloud provider, Immedion requires the ability to deliver predictable, ultrafast performance over time, consistent with its customers expectations. In addition to delivering reliable performance in a multitenant environment with unpredictable workloads, Immedion also needs to provide its customers the ability to quickly and easily adjust resource allocation through a self-service portal, spinning virtual machines (VMs) up and down as needed to meet evolving business requirements. Immedion is a fast-growing company and requires a storage architecture that allows the company to easily expand over time in a nondisruptive manner to accommodate increased business. To deliver the flexibility its customers need, Immedion runs a heavily virtualized IT infrastructure based around VMware vcloud. Immedion wanted to set itself apart from its competition by offering reliable, high-performing cloud storage solutions to its customers. Further, Immedion wanted to avoid excessive administrative time associated with storage tuning to address the noisy neighbor problem during periods of high utilization, such as during snapshot backup operations and data migrations (for onboarding new customers or retiring aging arrays) and storage infrastructure expansion tasks. Immedion wanted to integrate flash into its IT environment to address performance concerns and was particularly interested in evaluating the ability of scale-out storage architectures to address ease-of-use requirements around expansion. SolidFire s scale-out architecture, guaranteed quality-of-service capabilities, and strong multitenant support in vcloud environments attracted Immedion s attention, and during a proof of concept, the SF series system proved its ability to deliver consistent performance across widely varying workloads. With SolidFire, storage latencies dropped from a widely variable 5 15ms to consistently in the range of 2 3ms, allowing Immedion to implement a three-tiered storage service offering with guaranteed service levels. After the SolidFire storage system was implemented in mid-2015, storage tuning tasks literally dropped to zero, significantly lessening the administrative time each week. SolidFire s inline data reduction allowed Immedion to manage its high-growth environment with a significantly decreased storage footprint and lowered energy costs as well. Administrative span of control more than doubled, and Immedion predicts that SolidFire s easy expansion and automatic workload rebalancing will save the company a substantial amount of money relative to what it would have spent with its legacy storage infrastructure to keep up with growing demand. Document #US IDC. Page 13

14 Hosted Network is a Sydney, Australia based cloud service provider that offers white-labeled cloud services for desktop as a service (DaaS) and IaaS to managed service providers, IT integrators, and software vendors as well as end users. Hosted Network Hosted Network is a Sydney, Australia based cloud service provider that offers white-labeled cloud services for desktop as a service (DaaS) and IaaS to managed service providers, IT integrators, and software vendors as well as end users. As is true for most service providers, creating a cost-effective infrastructure to deliver consistent performance in the face of unpredictable workloads is a key challenge. To better respond to burgeoning customer requirements, Hosted Network planned to move its DaaS offering from an application virtualization (Citrix XenApp) approach to VDI based on VMware Horizon. The workload profile between application virtualization and VDI is very different, and consistent performance is of particular concern in VDI environments where routine I/O spikes, driven by boot, log-on, and log-out storms; rebuild times; and virus scans, can be as much as 10x the steady-state IOPS requirements. Response time and overall usability are key concerns of Hosted Network s customers, and the company s legacy storage infrastructure, built around scale-up array designs, would not be able to meet these requirements as Hosted Network moved to a VDI environment. Internal concerns for Hosted Network in managing its own IT infrastructure to meet customer requirements included ease of expandability and ongoing management. Hosted Network knew that it wanted to incorporate flash into its new DaaS environment and was, in particular, interested in newer storage architectures built around scale-out designs what Hosted Network s Managing Director Ben Town referred to as storage 2.0. SolidFire s features not only broadly met Hosted Network s preliminary requirements but also provided some new capabilities that quickly became foundational in Hosted Network s IT infrastructure. Storage latencies dropped from 5 20ms to consistently under 2ms, even in the face of the huge I/O bursts generated by VDI for boot storms and virus scans. Inline compression and deduplication was delivering a data reduction ratio of 10:1 for Hosted Network s VDI environment, allowing the company to significantly decrease floor space and energy requirements relative to what it would have spent with legacy storage infrastructure. The simplicity of SolidFire management also appealed to Hosted Network storage tuning time dropped to zero (a considerable advantage since those managing storage at Hosted Network were virtual, not storage administrators) and system expansion was easy just add a node and the system rebalanced the workload automatically with no manual tuning. Given that SolidFire could expand to 100 nodes and nondisruptively accommodate new-generation technologies, Hosted Network expected that it would be able to use the single system over a much longer depreciation life cycle, delaying the capital costs for system replacement by two to three years without jeopardizing its ability to meet customer requirements. The redundancy inherent in the scaleout design has also provided Hosted Network with a better fault management capability Document #US IDC. Page 14

15 application services are not impacted even in the event of a node failure as the workload is rapidly redistributed across remaining resources, all without operator intervention. SolidFire s QoS capabilities, while not part of the original purchase criteria, enabled Hosted Network to much more cost effectively establish (and charge for) guaranteed service levels. Hosted Network uses SolidFire for its Gold service tier and is tracking flash price-per-gigabyte costs closely to determine when it can move its Silver service tier to SolidFire as well, using the QoS controls to deliver performance to the levels required for each tier. Although originally Hosted Network had expected to deploy a storage silo for its new VDI environment, SolidFire s QoS controls have allowed Hosted Network to colocate other Gold workloads onto SolidFire without having to worry about the noisy neighbor problem, allowing Hosted Network to make more efficient use of its storage infrastructure to deliver its premium service tier. SolidFire s strong multitenant capabilities in VMware environments (which is what Hosted Network s virtual infrastructure is based on) will be critical in meeting customer requirements as Hosted Network continues to move more workloads to the platform over time. California Public Utilities Commission The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is a San Francisco, California based agency that regulates privately owned electric, natural gas, telecommunications, water, railroad, rail transit, and passenger transportation companies. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is a San Francisco, California based agency that regulates privately owned electric, natural gas, telecommunications, water, railroad, rail transit, and passenger transportation companies. With the business growing at 25 30% per year, the CPUC has been virtualizing its environment to leverage the administrative benefits that server consolidation on virtual infrastructure offers. Storage performance has been a factor limiting the ability to virtualize certain applications, which include relational database, messaging and collaboration, enterprise resource planning, and high-performance computing applications. As part of the migration, the CPUC also wanted to virtualize desktops, and because of performance concerns, the CPUC planned to add a siloed storage environment to ensure that noisy neighbor problems would not impact the performance of other applications. With CPUC s legacy storage infrastructure, latencies were typically in the range of 15 20ms and creeping higher as the environment expanded, limiting consolidation densities in the agency s virtual environment. Because of high IOPS requirements in VDI environments, driven by boot, log-on, and log-out storms as well as virus scans, the CPUC did not consider using hard disk drives and was looking at flash-based systems. The CPUC installed two SolidFire systems (one in a primary site and one in a DR site) as the VDI storage platform. Storage latencies with the SolidFire system were sub-millisecond, handling the routine performance spikes in the VDI environment with ease. The performance, ease of use, high-availability, and flexibility benefits of the SolidFire system prompted the CPUC to think about using it with other applications, particularly because the QoS Document #US IDC. Page 15

16 capabilities could ensure that the CPUC could dial in predictable performance as needed on an application-by-application basis in a multitenant environment. SolidFire s performance enabled the virtualization of applications that could not have been virtualized before because of performance concerns, and more applications were moved to SolidFire. In moving applications off physical servers and the legacy storage architecture, the CPUC achieved 30 40% increases in application performance across the board and reduced the storage footprint and power consumption by 25 50%, while SolidFire s ease of use reduced storage administration time by up to 90% on a monthly basis. Virtualizing the CPUC s SQL databases alone (something which could not have been done without SolidFire) allowed the agency to reduce the x86 server count required to drive the necessary storage performance, lowering software licensing costs. For the CPUC, the most important features of the SolidFire platform were its ability to guarantee IOPS through its QoS controls and the inherent redundancy of its scale-out architecture to transparently recover from failures and enable online system expansion. The CPUC expects to be able to expand the system, accommodating its growth while enabling more applications to be virtualized, with less cost and fewer administrative resources than it could have done with legacy storage designs. Richard Fleischman and Associates Richard Fleischman and Associates is a New York based IT services provider with global datacenter operations that offers technology solutions to financial services companies, including hedge funds, private equity funds, private wealth management, and alternative asset management funds. Richard Fleischman and Associates is a New York based IT services provider with global datacenter operations that offers technology solutions to financial services companies, including hedge funds, private equity funds, private wealth management, and alternative asset management funds. RFA s cloud platform, which the company launched in 2013, is growing at a very high rate, and RFA found that its conventional storage array could not meet the performance demands of its financial services client base. In particular, RFA wanted to eliminate all noisy neighbor performance issues; it has many clients that run very similar systems that run tasks at about the same time, resulting in potential usage peaks and performance pressure on the storage hardware underlying its cloud platform. These challenges pushed RFA to evaluate flash storage solutions to support its cloud platform s growth and performance demands. In 2014, RFA chose SolidFire s all-flash array storage solution, deploying five SolidFire nodes with plans to expand the environment as required to accommodate business growth. According to RFA, SolidFire has substantially improved key storage-related performance metrics, increasing its random access latencies by about 400% and improving its average throughput (in IOPS) by about 150%. RFA also reported storage and server hardware efficiencies with SolidFire, estimating that it would need about 30% more terabytes of storage with the other flash solutions it considered and several more servers. Document #US IDC. Page 16

17 RFA reported that SolidFire has helped it provide higher-quality cloud services and support expansion of its cloud services client base. In particular, RFA cited its ability to guarantee performance of its services as a differentiator; it attributed one recent client win in large part to its ability to guarantee the performance level of the client s high-performance analytics application. Meanwhile, RFA explained that it requires less time to provision resources with SolidFire, allowing it to deliver services to its clients in less time. As a result, RFA credits SolidFire with helping it earn substantial additional revenue. In addition to these business benefits, RFA benefits from SolidFire s reliability (no unplanned downtime since deployment), which is of critical importance to RFA s client base, and efficiencies in administering and maintaining SolidFire. According to RFA, it is now looking to extend its use of SolidFire to support more big data/analytics operations and transaction processing systems. Challenges And Opportunities For organizations working with 3rd Platform computing workloads, there are few downsides when deploying AFAs to replace legacy storage infrastructure. For organizations working with 3rd Platform computing workloads, there are few downsides when deploying AFAs to replace legacy storage infrastructure. Acquisition cost (in terms of price per gigabyte for raw flash capacity) still comes up as an issue despite the fact that AFAs have offered considerably faster payback and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than HDDbased systems since 2014 for the consolidation of performance-intensive primary storage workloads. The acquisition cost comparison is not a very relevant one for AFAs because their inline data reduction (a feature generally not available on HDD-based primary storage systems because of latency considerations) allows them to store so much more data on terabytes of storage than an HDD-based system. Average data reduction ratios across all workloads vary from 4:1 to 6:1 for most customers (with certain workloads like relational databases performing more in the range of 2:1 and VDI and other clone-intensive environments performing more in the range of 8:1 and higher). Price per gigabyte for raw storage capacity is a metric that has been in long-term use though, and IT organizations may have difficulty getting finance and accounting personnel to understand why the price per gigabyte is the proper metric for effective storage capacity that takes into account data reduction and other storage efficiency technologies enabled by high-performance flash storage. As organizations deploy their first AFAs, they often learn about the valuable benefits they bring to the table, which could have helped justify the purchase only after production deployment. The SolidFire customers in this study were no different they often cited how important some of these features, which included ease of management (storage tuning tasks drop to zero), an ability to cohost workloads such as VDI that they thought they would have to keep separate (because of QoS capabilities), and an ability to extend their enterprise storage depreciation life cycles by a year or two (because of the ease of expansion and Document #US IDC. Page 17

18 the ability of the scale-out design to easily accommodate new technology generations), became clear to them after they understood their true impact. Everyone understands flash performance, but AFAs offer so much more in terms of both IT infrastructure and business transformation for those that can think outside the box to improve existing datacenter and business processes and offer new services that weren t even feasible before. This can serve as a caveat to enterprises looking to deploy an AFA for the first time: Make sure you understand all the ramifications of flash deployment up front so that you can reap the maximum benefit from flash in the shortest time. Summary And Conclusion It is interesting to note that interviewees did not identify any downside to AFA deployment. In general, the path to AFA deployment started with an identified performance problem that legacy storage infrastructure could not meet, progressed to an evaluation of different AFA offerings that not only proved out flash performance but also highlighted the importance of scale-out architecture and good QoS capabilities, and moved to a production deployment that eventually led to additional discoveries about the benefits SolidFire brought to the table. Those additional discoveries included cost savings because of the secondary economic benefits of flash deployment at scale, an ability to leverage SolidFire to offer new premium services that opened up new markets and generated additional revenue, significantly reduced storage administration (particularly around storage tuning tasks), and an ability to pursue denser multitenancy without fear of the noisy neighbor problem to further lower operating costs. Business value was undeniably strong around the SolidFire deployments: a definitive resolution to storage performance problems, a five-month payback that led to a three-year ROI of 385%, and an average of $78,800 per SolidFire node year per in additional revenue. In all cases, interviewed customers deployed SolidFire as an addition to their datacenter environment (rather than as a replacement to their existing storage resources) but quickly began to move additional workloads onto the SolidFire solution, improving the performance of legacy infrastructure by offloading the more performance-sensitive applications onto flash. All interviewees were interested in deploying a storage infrastructure optimized for Web-scale environments, and SolidFire fit this bill admirably. Document #US IDC. Page 18

19 Appendix IDC s standard ROI methodology was used for this project. This methodology is based on gathering data from current users of SolidFire as the foundation for the model. Based on these interviews, IDC performs a three-step process to calculate the ROI and payback period:» Measure the savings from reduced IT costs (staff, hardware, software, maintenance, and IT support), increased user productivity, and improved revenue over the term of the deployment.» Ascertain the investment made in deploying the solution and the associated migration, training, and support costs.» Project the costs and savings over a three-year period and calculate the ROI and payback for the deployed solution. IDC bases the payback period and ROI calculations on a number of assumptions, which are summarized as follows:» Time values are multiplied by burdened salary (salary + 28% for benefits and overhead) to quantify efficiency and manager productivity savings.» Downtime values are a product of the number of hours of downtime multiplied by the number of users affected.» The impact of unplanned downtime is quantified in terms of impaired end-user productivity and lost revenue.» Lost productivity is a product of downtime multiplied by burdened salary.» Lost revenue is a product of downtime multiplied by the average revenue generated per hour.» The net present value of the three-year savings is calculated by subtracting the amount that would have been realized by investing the original sum in an instrument yielding a 12% return to allow for the missed opportunity cost. This accounts for both the assumed cost of money and the assumed rate of return. Because every hour of downtime does not equate to a lost hour of productivity or revenue generation, IDC attributes only a fraction of the result to savings. As part of our assessment, we asked each company what fraction of downtime hours to use in calculating productivity savings and the reduction in lost revenue. IDC then taxes the revenue at that rate. Document #US IDC. Page 19

20 Further, because IT solutions require a deployment period, the full benefits of the solution are not available during deployment. To capture this reality, IDC prorates the benefits on a monthly basis and then subtracts the deployment time from the first-year savings. Note: All numbers in this document may not be exact due to rounding. IDC Global Headquarters 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA idc-insights-community.com Copyright Notice External Publication of IDC Information and Data Any IDC information that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from the appropriate IDC Vice President or Country Manager. A draft of the proposed document should accompany any such request. IDC reserves the right to deny approval of external usage for any reason. Copyright 2016 IDC. Reproduction without written permission is completely forbidden. About IDC International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make fact-based decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries worldwide. For 50 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world s leading technology media, research, and events company. Document #US IDC. Page 20