All Over In a Flash – The Growth of Flash Arrays
“The market grew significantly faster than we expected” said Eric Burgener of IDC when talking about the Flash Array market in 2014 – not every technology “trend” can get that kind of an analyst reaction right? The numbers seem to justify the comment though - $ 11.3 Billion in revenues in 2014 across All Flash Arrays as well as Hybrid Flash Arrays according to IDC. It seems that every storage vendor has a Flash play now – Violin Memory to start things off, the biggies like Dell, EMC & NetApp and the “startups” like Nimble, Pure Storage and SolidFire are all solidly in there with AFA & HFA offerings. Performance in specific applications drove early adoption of Flash but the corner seems to have been turned of late. More and more vendors seem to be bundling features into their systems that have enterprises firmly in their sights – snapshots, better security and replication are all available now. Then there is also the improving cost per gig – still not in the...