Enterprise flash drives will move to dominate tier 1 storage over the next 12 months to 36 months. Data centre storage arrays will see their 15,000 rpm Fibre Channel hard drives replaced by NAND enterprise flash drives that offer much faster access at a price that will be comparable to Fibre Channel disk. Does this strike you as likely? No? Let's try and argue the case for it.
Enterprise flash drive capacities set to grow
Violin Memory offers a 5 TB externally attached 1010 Memory Appliance today, one that uses single-level cell (SLC) NAND chips. It's more expensive than a Fibre Channel drive array and isn't going to occasion a mass transfer of tier 1 data to NAND enterprise flash drives. But, Violin is set to introduce 10 TB and 20 TB versions later this year and hopes to achieve a 40 TB version. With those capacities it starts to look interesting.
