Even as total spending on storage continues to fall, enterprises and other businesses are pouring money into flash storage technology. IDC recently reported that total enterprise storage systems sales reached $8.2 billion in the first quarter of 2016, down 7 percent over last year, while total worldwide external storage systems sales fell 3.6 percent year over year to $5.4 billion. During that time, however, all-flash storage array sales grew 87.4 percent during the first quarter of 2016 compared to last year.
While increased sales of all-flash storage solutions have typically been driven by the falling cost and increasing performance of flash storage technology, 2016 is seeing vendors move to introduce new capabilities beyond pure performance, including software-defined solutions, better pooling of flash among multiple systems, and more enterprise features.
