There will likely be a day in the not too distant future when historians will look at the use of spinning drive media just as those today view the use of vacuum tubes: A necessary but transitory step. The storage industry and the IT industry as a whole are amid a large-scale transition to solid-state (or flash) storage technology. Prior to the emergence of solid-state storage, IT organisations often went to great lengths to eke out the necessary performance from mechanical-based drives. As such, drive-based storage solutions often served as the bottleneck for the entire data centre design.
The advent of solid-state storage and all-flash arrays has presented IT organisations with an opportunity to eliminate this bottleneck. As organisations are already starting to understand, when a serious performance bottleneck is removed, the positive impacts can be data-centre-wide. With performance arguably the most pronounced benefit of all those associated with solid-state storage, it is easy to understand how the earliest adoption of solid-state was seen in those performance-starved applications where a performance increase translated into a tangible business benefit.
As the price of solid-state storage declines and the value increases, many IT organisations have expanded their solid-state storage footprints to other transactional workloads, such as database applications and server virtualisation environments.
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