A Dell VP has said reclaiming installed SSDs for reuse is risk-laden as data could be lost.
David Noy, VP for Product Management at Dell and VP of Product Management at VAST Data before that, asks: “When supply chain shortages threaten to disrupt your AI build-out plans, who are you going to trust?”
As SSD supply shortages are set to continue for 12 months or more, VAST Data is implementing a Flash Reclaim strategy to repurpose a customer’s existing SSD capacity where possible, moving the SSDs from a competitor’s storage system, such as a Dell PowerScale, into a storage chassis controlled by VAST’s software. There they will, VAST claims, store more data because VAST’s software is better at data reduction and takes up less SSD capacity when protecting against failures.
Noy says: “‘Flash recycling’ as a strategy is a great marketing sound bite, but also a sign of pressure – not progress… That may sound pragmatic – but it carries real risk. For software-only storage vendors, it is a sign that desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“Flash drives wear out with use. Reintroducing aging media increases the likelihood of accelerated component failure, data unavailability, and, in the worst case, catastrophic data loss – exactly the opposite of what AI and mission-critical workloads require.”
Unlike flash-only vendors such as VAST and Pure, Dell supports tiering across all-flash, hybrid flash-disk, and disk arrays. That means less critical data can be moved off flash media, thus you need less of it.
According to Noy: “Flash-only vendors, including VAST Data and Pure Storage, leave little room to maneuver when markets shift. No tiering. No flexibility. No cushion when flash prices rise or lead times stretch… We don’t force customers into flash. And that matters – especially as flash prices rise faster than HDD, while disk remains multiple times more cost-efficient for capacity-heavy data.”
He signs off by saying: “In constrained markets, architecture matters. But who you trust to stand behind it matters even more.”
Comment
DDN is another supplier supporting a multi-tiered storage strategy, from NVMe SSD, ordinary SSD, disk drive, and cloud storage, with automated, policy-driven data movement, and a parallel storage architecture to preserve flash-level data access speed for data across the tiers. DDN, like Dell, says that the best way to deal with SSD supply shortages is to be less dependent on expensive SSDs in the first place.
