As flash storage has permeated mainstream computing, enterprises are coming to better understand not only its performance benefits but also the secondary economic benefits of flash deployment at scale. This combination of benefits — lower latencies, higher throughput and bandwidth, higher storage densities, much lower energy and floor space consumption, higher CPU utilization, the need for fewer servers and their associated lower software licensing costs, lower administration costs, and higher device-level reliability — has made the use of AFAs an economically compelling choice relative to legacy storage architectures initially developed for use with hard disk drives (HDDs). As growth rates for hybrid flash arrays (HFAs) and HDD-only arrays fall off precipitously, AFAs are experiencing one of the highest growth rates in external storage today — a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26.2% through 2020.
Primary Flash Market Evolving to Next-Generation Architectures
