It’s no secret within the storage industry that sales of physical arrays are slowing down. What with alternatives like cloud storage and virtual arrays proving themselves to be far cheaper and just as useful, it’s getting harder to justify the cost of a dedicated array for many apps.

That’s what Henry Baltazar of Forrester Research thinks anyway, and he explains why in a recent post titled “Make Your Next Storage Array An App”.

According to Baltazar, most arrays are basically just x86 servers, but the problem is these are sold in such a fashipon that they lock organizations to an inflexible resource for years to come. The hardware isn’t cheap either, which is hardly a bonus in a day and age where the cloud is running riot.

Which is why it’s time for organizations to recognize that arrays are too inflexible and too expensive to be practical anymore, says Baltazar. Instead, he recommends that organizations seriously consider switching to virtual arrays the next time they need to buy additional storage capacity.

Baltazar goes on to recommend the likes of Hewlett-Packard Company, Maxta Inc., Nexenta Systems Inc., and Sanbolic Inc., all of which are well-established in the virtual array biz. He also notes that IBM Corp., EMC Corp., and NetApp Inc., are worthy of consideration, though neither DataCore Softwarew nor VMware Inc., were mentioned even though both companies offer virtual arrays too.

“Now is the right time to start treating storage technology more like an application and leverage commodity pricing of hardware components such as flash SSDs which are often less expensive than storage media sourced from an enterprise storage vendor,” writes Baltazar.

It’s telling that Baltazar should mention Flash, because array vendors are generally keen to highlight their ability to optimize their products for the I/O requirements that solid state storage brings to the data centre. If Baltazar is correct that engineering is now more or less irrelevant, the shift towards virtual storage really will be unstoppable.

Those who follow the storage industry will claim that Baltazar hasn’t really provided any startlingly new insights in his post, but that he says it nonetheless means people shouldn’t definitely take notice.

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