The digital economy continues to grow, and as it does, it places an increased value on information held within datacenters. Today, enormous amounts of data are being created from a variety of sources, such as applications, new mobile devices, big data analytics, and the cloud. This is changing the speed with which business is conducted and the scale in which it occurs. Moreover, the digital explosion shows no sign of slowing, and IDC expects the amount of data being stored to grow in excess of 50% per year over the next few years.

For IT managers, dealing with these vast quantities of data presents a significant challenge at a time when storage budgets are limited and IT staffs are shrinking. Over the past five years, spending on IT hardware and software has increased by almost 25%. Yet, these challenges do not fully convey the pain points that continue to exist for enterprises that are dealing with the data growth in a cost-effective manner. Compounding the task is the need to provide higher performance and improved responsiveness required in the most demanding environments.

Enterprises are faced with a myriad of challenges such as the vast quantities of data being generated in our digital universe, the ever-growing number of applications, the cloud, virtualization, and big data analytics. Taken together, these issues place pressure on enterprise infrastructures to deliver higher performance and improved responsiveness at greater levels of efficiency. While a number of IT trends factor into the transformation of today’s datacenters, the use of solid state storage (SSS) in conjunction with solid state drives (SSDs) has begun to play an important role in the enterprise market, and the enterprise all-SSS array market will grow to $1.2 billion in revenue by 2015.

IDC has examined the growing use of flash across the enterprise and how the technology is being deployed to improve performance and efficiency. This Technology Spotlight discusses various aspects associated with deploying flash technology and explores the role that Hitachi Data Systems and its full portfolio of flash solutions play in this increasingly important market.