At one time, all-flash storage arrays were used for a single mission-critical application with a need for speed, usually in big IT shops. Now they’re poised to take over many more parts of IT.

Systems are being scaled down and tuned to the requirements of medium-sized enterprises, while larger, petabyte-scale flash platforms are about to take on big-data number crunching with unprecedented performance.

Falling costs are the main reason. Flash media gets cheaper as it packs more bits into the same amount of space, so its speed advantage over spinning disks is within reach for more enterprises. And at larger scale, it boosts data-center efficiency in ways that can multiply the savings.

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