Organizations that are thinking of buying in to SAP’s in-memory HANA database now have another deployment option courtesy of Nimble Storage, Inc., which is launching a new reference architecture specifically designed to support fast analytic workloads. The announcement comes only a few days after one its top competitors certified its rival flash arrays to support the platform.

Pure Storage, Inc. is pursuing the same goal of helping customers unlock the full speed potential of their implementations, a task that’s nearly impossible with traditional disk-based systems. The problem lies in the fact that while HANA manipulates files in memory, the data still has to be pulled from persistent storage first, an operation that mechanical drives can slow down.

That creates significant delays when added up across the terabytes of information that a typical large-scale deployment processes every day, a scenario that speedier flash storage can help avoid. Nimble hopes that bundling its arrays with servers and networking equipment from Cisco Systems, Inc. into an integrated platform will help set its value proposition apart.

The company needs to differentiate not only from Pure but also several other vendors that have already thrown their weight behind HANA, most notably Violin Memory, Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. That intense rivalry reflects the strategic importance of the platform – or more accurately, its adopters – in the fight for solid-state memory dominance.

Organizations that are willing to pay for the large amounts of memory needed to support HANA place a premium on speed, which makes them that much more likely to purchase an expensive flash array than their less performance-conscious counterparts. Also factoring into the equation is the fact that SAP is investing heavily to promote adoption within its vast customer base, which means that the future market for the platform will potentially be exponentially larger than it is today.

But the usefulness of flash storage for applications such as HANA doesn’t stop at merely speeding up the process of moving data into memory. Wikibon sees organizations starting to shift toward using flash as a memory extension, a trend that is poised to open whole new opportunities for analytically-minded users.