These benefits come at a cost — flash arrays are simply more expensive than traditional HDDs. However, the price has decreased over the past several years, and those who’ve deployed flash storage arrays are more than likely to demonstrate significant ROI.
In Alexandria, Able estimated the IT department would save from $300,000 to $500,000 over a 10-year period.
“The cost of flash storage has come down,” he says. “In a small municipality like ours, that cost savings has helped us budget money into other places.”
MORE FROM STATETECH: See how offsite data storage helps local agencies with disaster recovery.
Davenport, Iowa, Was an Early Adopter of All-Flash Storage
In Davenport, Iowa, the city’s IT department installed its first flash array from Pure Storage in 2011. Cory Smith, Davenport’s CIO, had been running VMware on traditional hard drives when the system began to develop problems with latency.
“This was prior to the general availability of Pure Storage,” Smith says. “We entered into a beta agreement with Pure Storage, and the rest is history.”
Smith and the IT department tested the flash array for the police and fire departments, which consisted of a few hundred virtual desktops, and found that the new units solved the latency and bandwidth issues.