Johannesburg, 15 Oct 2021
SSD adoption is surging globally, particularly in the Far East, and starting to enter double digit growth in South Africa. This is according to Morgan Malyon, executive product manager and senior solutions manager at Huawei Technologies.
Speaking during a Pinnacle and Huawei webinar on all-flash storage, Malyon said slower growth in South Africa could be due to myths and misconceptions that persisted in the country.
Polls of webinar participants found 89% felt there were myths that needed to be debunked around all-flash storage, and that all of them were planning an all-flash strategy.
“Common myths around all-flash include that it is expensive, unreliable, ‘just an expensive memory stick’ and only designed for specific application workloads. Other misconceptions around the technology are that it cannot match the scalability of traditional storage platforms, and that it will not support tiering of hot and cold data,” Malyon said.
“Initially there was a specific subset of application workloads suited to the technology, and as an emerging technology it was expensive, but times have changed, the technology has evolved, and it is proving itself.”
Debunking the myths, Malyon said: “The technology is not expensive when you consider what you are getting – it can in some instances be cheaper than a spinning disk. It has been proven to deliver up to 5 – 7x performance improvement, and capacity growth on SSD is outstripping traditional spinning drives. The technology is also reliable – the mean time between failure rates are exceeding those of spinning disks because there are no moving parts.”
“At first we were seeing very small capacities on SSDs, we’re at a stage now where we are seeing up to 100TB SSDs allowing you to do more with less, and still get massive performance gains.” He added that SSDs do allow tiering of hot and cold data.
In addition, he noted that diverse workload adoption is driving the adoption of all-flash. “We are seeing a multitude of use cases evolve as the cost has come down, the reliability goes up and we see the benefits of a significant performance improvement,” he said.
“Adoption is starting to pick up – particularly in the cloud environment – and we are seeing more organisations wanting to have discussions about it now, and more customers moving away from spinning disks to an SSD environment. Huawei has invested heavily in SSD technology and is taking it very seriously, to take the third place in the market.”
Huawei is also committed to moving to a green data centre where SSD drives a lower cost of consumption, he added.
James Nel, business unit manager: Huawei Enterprise at Pinnacle said: “Fear is one of the biggest factors that comes into play, especially when it comes to data. People are very protective of their data, so major concerns are migration, security, and ‘will it work?’. The biggest question around newer technologies like SSD is ‘what is in it for me?’. You have to look at the complete value add and total cost of ownership with SSDs, including speed, performance, cost savings, and power and environmental savings. For us, it’s a future-proofing technology.”
Nel added that as an authorised distributor for Huawei in South Africa and also into Africa, Pinnacle has grown Huawei distribution strongly across the SADC and rest of Africa in recent years.
Pinnacle is a Huawei Certified Service Partner and now has three Huawei Experience Centres – in Midrand, Durban and Cape Town, and has Huawei Enterprise, Cloud and Consumer divisions. The Huawei team at Pinnacle has grown strongly and will be 16 strong by the end of this year, with 52 regional technical teams and 34 certified on Huawei.
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