Flash is the new buzzword in data storage. As more and more innovations take place in the development of flash by various companies, the question arises: How does this impact their data in the cloud?

To address this issue, John Furrier and Stu Miniman of theCUBE interviewed Eric Burgener, Research Director at the International Data Corporation (IDC), at the Nimble Adaptive Flash launch in June 2014. IDC is a global leader in market intelligence and helps companies make informed decisions based on the facts presented.

How Flash Is Changing to Meet Business Needs

When asked how flash was evolving to try to meet the demands for a more robust storage environment, Burgener responded by stating that on the server side of flash, low latency is key, though resiliency comes in on a network standpoint. By pointing the storage solution to different servers on the network, companies can have access to their data when they need it most, such as when an outage occurs.

Whereas before flash was thought of as a single market, today flash has grown to provide a solution to growing data storage needs.

• Expected Growth in the Flash Market

According to Burgener, by 2017 the all-flash array market should increase to $1.6 billion, or a growth of 58 percent per year. This compared to the hybrid market that expects to see a market of $14.3 billion in the same time period. The hybrid market, which is already well established, would only grow by 21 percent. The hybrid market, which combines the public and private cloud, can deliver now where flash can’t, though this trend should change as new flash innovations are developed.

How Does This Growth Affect Older Architectures?

With the development of all-flash arrays and flash optimized storage architectures, where does that leave older architectures? According to Burgener, there is a huge distinction between the performance of an SSD device in a legacy architecture versus SSDs placed in flash optimized architecture.

He went on to say, “In talking with customers out there, and also vendors and the tests they’ve run, we are seeing a five to 10 times performance difference in terms of throughput for the same device, newer architecture versus the older one. So there is a huge advantage from a cost point of view in leveraging flash optimized architectures if cost is a concern, which for most people it is.”

See his entire segment below: