Flash storage market remains a tsunami

An IT industry analyst article published by SearchSolidStateStorage.

A few months ago, Taneja Group surveyed 694 enterprise IT folks (about half in management, half in architecture/operations) about their storage acceleration and performance needs, perceptions and plans. Of course, examining the role and future of flash storage was a big part of our analysis of the flash storage market.

One of the key questions we asked was if they each thought that all-flash arrays would be used for all tier 1 workloads in the enterprise data center by the end of 2017, less than two years out. We found that 18% agreed without qualification, while another 35% agreed but thought they might need more time to accommodate natural storage refresh cycles. Together, that’s a majority of 53% firmly in the all-flash future camp, while only 10% outright disagreed that all-flash was going to be the dominant future storage platform.

Of course “tier 1” can mean different things to different folks, but people generally agree that tier 1 is their primary application storage powering key business processes. We followed up with several vendors about their all-flash future footprint visions and, unsurprisingly, we found broader, more inclusive descriptions. In general, all-flash array vendors think that all tier 1 and tier 2 data center storage could be on all-flash, while vendors with wider portfolios — including traditional storage and hybrids — have naturally hedged their bets on the flash storage market to “let” the client obtain what they see as best fitting their needs.

…(read the complete as-published article there)