Family of All-flash Storage
In 2012, enterprise storage vendor Pure Storage® shipped the first enterprise-class all-flash array (AFAs), called the FlashArray™. By 2016, all the other enterprise storage vendors had introduced their own AFAs, and over the last decade AFAs have come to dominate storage shipments for high-performance and highavailability workloads. Compared to hard disk drive (HDD)-based storage systems, AFAs delivered better and more consistent performance, higher availability, better reliability, enabled the use of critical new technologies like compression and deduplication for latency-sensitive workloads, were far easier to manage than HDD-based systems, and lowered both energy and floorspace consumption. As a result, the market for “high-performance” 10K and 15K RPM HDDs has almost disappeared.