Report: Flash Array Market Reached $11B in 2014

Aggressive improvements by suppliers and increasingly complex workloads in customer data centers drove the flash-based array market past $11 billion in 2014, according to new research from IDC.

Further enterprise adoption and explosive growth witnessed in this market was guided by startups and enterprise storage vendors alike improving the reliability and performance of flash-based arrays and lowering the effective cost per gigabyte. The IDC report looks at Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp, and Oracle, as well as highlighting start-up revenue leaders, including Nimble Storage, Pure Storage and SolidFire.

"Because of the increasing maturity of flash-based arrays, along with more widespread recognition about the secondary economic benefits of flash deployment among end users, we have seen the overall market grow faster than we had originally forecast in 2013," Eric Burgener, research director, IDC storage systems, said in a statement. "As legacy arrays come up for technology refresh, we are seeing more and more customers evaluate flash-based options."

When studying this market IDC breaks down the taxonomy of the enterprise storage market by I/O-intensive, performance-optimized, and capacity-optimized solutions. It then compares vendors by revenue and raw capacity shipped.

Flash has become a mainstream solution, flash-optimized features like in-line compression and de-duplication, as well as technology refresh cycles helping pave the way.