Itself No Longer Disruptive, Flash is Enabling Other Disruptive Tech
Back in 2013 industry analysts 451 Research undertook a challenging project to try and map out the technologies that could prove most disruptive to the data center industry over the next 15 plus years.
The result was the ‘Disruptive Technologies in the Datacenter’ report, which I was fortunate enough to contribute to. It turned out to be one of the most widely read and well received reports 451 had ever produced.
A short-list of ten technologies were assessed by a team of experts and given a score in terms of how big, how likely, and how fast the disruptive impact could be.
The technologies included chiller-free data centers, silicon photonics, on-site clean energy generation, cloud-level resiliency, and advanced DCIM. However, the top-ranked technology in terms of its potential disruptive impact was flash storage. The report concluded:
“Flash memory, the storage technology that is widely used in smartphones and other consumer devices, is the emerging datacenter technology that suppliers and operators should be most focused on, in terms of assessing and planning for it. Flash is likely to be widely adopted in the datacenter in the form of flash arrays, and, because of its low power use and low latency, it could prove widely disruptive when adopted at scale.” – Source 451 Research, Disruptive Technologies in the Datacenter, 2013.
Recently – five years later – 451 released an update to the report, and this time around, flash did not make the list. There’s an important reason for that: its adoption has reached a point that it no longer qualifies as disruptive.
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