Big data, the cloud and high-end analytics are all helping to spur demand for flash-based storage arrays in the enterprise. But most industry observers agree that the prohibitive costs of the technology will limit its deployment to a few select environments and applications where speed really matters.

A flash storage array is a solid state storage system that contains multiple flash memory drives instead of hard disk drives. Flash first started to find its way into hybrid flash/ disk arrays provided by the major storage vendors as far back as 2008, complementing the hard drives used to store most of the data.

Since then, the hype has gone into overdrive. However, the consensus is that flash has its place, but is not the right solution for every environment.