By now, the industry has more or less reached a consensus that solid-state memory is a game changer for enterprise storage, but the question of exactly how big of an impact it will have on the way organizations store and access their data still persists. Stu Miniman, the resident software-led infrastructure analyst at Wikibon, appeared on SiliconANGLE’s CubeConversations series to clear up some of the whitespace in the wake of the string of major updates that have come out of the flash market recently.

Although each significant in their own right, Wikibon looks at the high-profile acquisitions and product releases of the past few months in the broader context of the overall segment’’s evolution, which it mapped to a 10-year  trajectory that traces its starting point to 2008. According to Miniman, the trend is set to grow more  in the next four years than it has in the previous six.

Rapid growth

The rapid increase in flash adoption underscores the accelerating maturation of the technology, which has also manifested itself in the market consolidating through  acquisitions. The most notable example is SanDisk’s June purchase of Fusion-io, but Miniman pointed out that the landmark deal was only the latest in a string. Disk storage stalwart Western Digital paid $685 million for Fusion-io competitor Virident last September, while Seagate bought LSI’s SSD assets from parent company Avago for  $450 million to take  earlier this year.

“We’re starting to see the same thing on the flash side, so the component vendors are gonna consolidate down and you have to see who’s gonna differentiate and who will be able to own that market,” he explained. “You’ve got a handful of players that are trying to be the next generation not only of the component [market] but also trying to make a new systems business out there.”

The tremendous amount of activity that the flash industry has been witnessing lately is spread among several distinct sub-segments, one of the the fastest growing of which is the pure-SSD array market. Miniman cited Gartner as saying that the market for such systems nearly tripled from $236 million in 2012 to about $667 by the end of the following year, a staggering increase that reflects the immense benefits offered by the technology.

Flash holds the potential to bridge the I/O gap between storage and compute that has held back application developers from taking full advantage of Moore’s law for the last half a century. And it’s turning out to have an equally disruptive impact on data center operations, since the faster and denser  the capacity, the less servers are required to handle it, which significantly reduces the overall cost of databases and other enterprise software licensed on a per-core basis.

“Anybody who knows databases knows that it’s the Oracle and SQL licenses that take up the majority of the budget, so anything that can be done to adjust that even a little bit can have huge ramifications on the overall budget,” Miniman explained. That overhead reduction, which can also be extended to other parts of the data center, free up resources that normally go to keeping the lights on for driving tangible business value.

Reality check

Yet despite the many advantages of the technology, it’s not about to displace disk as the dominant media type in the enterprise any time soon.  There are a number of reasons for that, Miniman detailed, chief of which is the fact that SSDs are currently much more expensive than mechanical storage. Acknowledging that reality, vendors are not marketing their flash arrays as general-purpose solutions  but rather as a specialized answer to a specialized need: a speedy storage tier capable of supporting the requirements of performance-intensive applications.

The status quo is set to change, however, as the the price per gigabyte of solid-state memory continues on an accelerating downward trajectory. That steady reduction, compounded by the rise of new and disruptive storage architectures, may very well render mechanical storage obsolete in the not-so-distant future.

“The big question is, when you talk about disruption, what happens to traditional storage arrays? Because they’re getting eaten away by flash, by new architectures like Server SAN, which can leverage both disk and flash,” Miniman said. “Over the next 2-3 years there will be big disruption, so by the time users go through their next upgrade cycles, they might want to look at what they’re doing and not just add another box.”

Flash may end up replacing disk one day, but the potentially tectonic changes in the technology landscape won’t necessarily be mirrored in the vendor sphere. Miniman explained that the storage industry is so fragmented that a new player would  be hard pressed to break into the big leagues, let alone secure a dominant share of the market. But only time will tell.

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