All IDC research is © 2015 by IDC. All rights reserve. The document discusses how virtual infrastructure has become mainstream in enterprise IT, with server consolidation making it difficult for spinning disks to provide predictable performance. It notes that flash storage is essential for virtual computing environments due to the challenges spinning disks face in meeting performance and management needs of consolidated virtual workloads. The market for all-flash arrays is forecast to grow significantly with a projected market size of $5 billion by 2019.

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An IDC Infographic, Sponsored By NetApp SolidFire
Virtual infrastructure has become the mainstream
deployment model in enterprise IT today.
Server consolidation
makes it difficult for
spinning disks to provide
predictable performance.
Performance complaints
drive admins to spend
a lot of time tuning
performance.
High HDD latencies preclude
the use of in-line storage
efficiency technologies to help
manage data growth.
I/O stream is extremely random,
slowing spinning disks even more.
Throughput requirements of
densely consolidated
workloads require hundreds to
thousands of spinning disks:
Hard to manage, high energy
and floor space needs
Spinning disks are challenged in
virtual environments.
Flash is essential for virtual computing.
Robust growth is forecasted for
the All-Flash Array (AFA) market.
I/O workloads generated by densely
consolidated virtual infrastructure
cannot be cost-effectively met with
spinning disks, driving a meteoric
rise in the AFA market.
AFAs grow to a $5B
MARKET by 2019
taking over an estimated
67.2% of the primary
external storage market.
The Benefits of
Flash Storage
for Virtualized Environments
of all enterprises
have a “virtual first”
strategy for new
server deployment.
Percentage of all
x86workloads to be
virtualized by 2019
84.9%OVER
77%
of enterprises currently
using AFAs want to
move more workloads
to them over time
100%
of enterprises are bullish
about the “all-flash data
center for primary storage”
of enterprises are committed
to having an all-flash data
center for primary storage
80%
8%
of enterprises had
greater than 50% of
their storage attached
to virtual machines.
82%
IDC Survey
Managing
Data Growth
• Storage infrastructure scale
• In-line data reduction (4:1 to 6:1 on average)
• Focus on effective not raw capacity
• Hundreds of thousands to millions of IOPS
• Consistent performance to meet sub millisecond SLAs
Increasing
Performance
• Data protection with high performance
• Rapid data movement for fast recovery
• SSDs have higher reliability than HDDs
• Bring new VMs up almost instantly
• Performant storage efficiency technologies
Agility And
Lower Cost
Availability
And Reliability
Key storage challenges in
virtual environments:
Managing
data growth Increasing
performance
Meeting
availablity
requirements
Meeting
agility
requirements
4.0 3.9 3.9 3.9
On a 5 point scale, enterprises identify their most pressing storage challenges.