We are in the third platform computing era and enterprises of all sizes are being asked to continue to support legacy applications while providing support for next-generation applications in mobile computing, social media, big data/analytics, and cloud environments. As most IT organizations are consolidating around virtual infrastructure for both legacy and new applications, this has significantly changed the I/O profiles that storage infrastructure has to deal with.

It has become clear that for more primary storage workloads, hard disk drives (HDDs) no longer adequately meet the requirements of IT organizations. As a result, enterprises are shifting their storage revenue away from HDD-based designs toward newer flash-based designs. Flash-based designs offer many benefits including: