Is everything as flashy as they say?

During the last few weeks (or even years) there was a lot of news on Flash. Flash as a Cache, All Flash Arrays (AFA) Hybrid Arrays and Flash in memory banks (UltraDIMM). It seems the Start-ups make a lot of rumble on all this new technology, but looking at the announcements made during the first two days during EMCWorld2014 it looks like the big fish are hunting the small ones, and will soon circle around the smaller fish, they’re ready to eat them… or not ;-D

Processing the IOPS as close to CPU as possible and with the quickest medium out there seems to be the way to go. But we need a way to leverage this . Which application goes on which medium and when will the medium “Flush” the data to the next Tier? Or will we just rely on caching software and let it decide where the data will be stored?

Everybody seems to be using Flash as the Tier behind RAM, but does that mean HDD’s are dead? Or will they function as the capacity tier as long as Flash is much more expensive then traditional storage? And what about the future, like ReRAM or other Flash successors?

But in the midst of all this rumble there is a question that needs aswering… How to manage this new storage world and a special question is how to manage the multiple storage arrays a lot of the companies have these days. I’m  writing a VMware design for a company in the Netherlands and they have HP and NetApp storage in their Datacenters, and managing them is not as simple as it can be… What is your secret to manage the datacenter of the future (or the one you’re managing now), or do you already use the perfect tool and are you willing to share?