$1.2 Billion in Revenue by 2015 for All Flash Arrays

The rising tide of digital data and the torrent of applications to the
cloud, virtualization, and big data and analytics have enterprises
struggling to find the necessary performance with their traditional HDD
infrastructure.

According to new research from International Data Corporation, Worldwide Enterprise All-Solid State Storage Array 2013-2016 Forecast
(IDC #240424, 35 pages, $15,000), the use of solid state storage (SSS)
in conjunction with SSDs will play an important role in transforming
performance as well as use cases for enterprise application data.

IDC’s first all-SSS array market forecast predicts $1.2 billion in revenues by 2015.

In
an effort to optimize storage solutions for performance, organizations
are placing their most frequently accessed application data , or hot
data, on high-performing solid state storage and less frequently
accessed data, or cooler data, on the most capacity efficient HDDs.
Organizations leveraging the right balance of solid state storage are
able to reduce the average physical footprint while delivering more
transactions (IOPS) over a similarly configured environment with
traditional storage media.

Additionally, pricing declines in the
underlying SSD media are dropping the system dollar per gigabyte prices,
making the high-performance storage technology more affordable and
appealing to a broader storage market.

"Traditional disk
technology has not kept pace with CPU technology, resulting in a
significant performance gap between storage and computing," said Dan Iacono, research director, storage systems, IDC. "This
shortfall in performance presents a huge opportunity for solid state
storage to fill the void in terms of both IOPS and latency."

Although
the historical metric of dollar per gigabyte ($/GB) remains an
important factor in the purchasing process, price performance metrics,
such as dollar per IOP ($/IOP) and dollar per workload ($/workload) are
holding more weight.

Additional findings from IDC’s research include:

• The rapid maturity of storage offerings (adding enterprise features) is accelerating adoption into the enterprise.
• The all-flash storage array – without any spinning media or traditional HDD – is gaining market attention.
• Incumbent
  storage vendors are offering all-SSD configurations of existing storage
  array lines through substituting SSDs instead of traditional HDDs
  within an array.
• Advancements made in semiconductor technology
  over the past decade and technological improvements have enabled NAND
  flash media to achieve an overall price point that is affordable for a
  broader market adoption.