If disk is the heavyweight segment of the storage market, dominated by seven vendors – three pureplay (EMC, NetApp and HDS) and four IT generalists (IBM, HP, Dell and Oracle/Sun) holding more than 80% of the market, then flash – solid state – is the cocky up and comer and 2011 was the year that flash finally made the jump to legitimate contender. And while disk continues to muscle along, accounting for the lion’s share of the storage market being driven by data growing at almost 60% per year, the much smaller flash market is undergoing hypergrowth.
Network Computing