First, The Good News: Flash Storage Sales Soar

The ray of hope for storage vendors is the booming sales of flash storage systems, which are growing as customers accept the higher performance and lower power consumption and footprint of flash storage versus that of disk-based storage.

IDC said the total all-flash storage array market grew 75.7 percent in the first quarter of 2017, over the same period last year, to reach almost $1.4 billion in revenue. All-flash storage accounted for 15.2 percent of the total enterprise storage market.

Sales of hybrid flash storage arrays also did well, reaching $2.0 billion in revenue and accounting for 22.0 percent of the total market, IDC said.