The All-flash Data Center Is Imminent
The efficient storage infrastructure of the future.
In the enterprise storage market, flash media strongly dominates in performance-sensitive workloads. Although enterprise-class storage systems based entirely upon flash only entered the market in 2012, by 2019 up to 80% or more of revenues driven by primary storage workloads came from all-flash arrays (AFAs). By that time, hard disk drives (HDDs) had already been mostly relegated to secondary workloads that were more capacity- and cost-constrained than primary workloads, but they still accounted for roughly 90% of the stored enterprise data. Given the continued advance of flash semiconductor technology, a lively discussion is happening in enterprise storage about the ultimate fate of HDDs in the data center.