With the release of Ted 2 last week, visions of Flash Gordon are again floating through our heads, but Flash Gordon isn’t the only heroic version of flash to hit the big-time this year. The commercial market for flash, of the SSD (solid state drive) variety, just grew 31 percent in units in Q1 2015 versus the prior year period. So, what’s the big deal? Why are all the luminaries in the IT industry talking about it?

A myriad of reasons come-to-mind that are driving demand, but we’ll isolate a few major ones for now. First, many organizations are gravitating towards virtualizing their infrastructure, coupled with adopting VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), which also alters the nature of the workload into more randomized I/O (input/output). In essence, traditional disks don’t handle that randomness as well as SSDs, and the IOPs (input output per second) slow down. Second, as firms continue to build out larger data centers, they seek best practices in the areas of reducing rising utility costs. Since SSDs take less power to run versus their HDD counterparts, this also saves organizations in operating expenses. Lastly, with the explosive growth of data due to social media, mobility, and electronic commerce, more firms are embarking on data mining or big data strategies. To add more color, from a big data perspective, firms that are storing and dealing with tremendous amounts of data will separate data on different drives. For example, data that is less often used will be stored on more commodity drives, while data that is frequently used (“hot data”) is being stored on solid state drives for more optimal query performance.

From an application perspective, applications that are best suited for solid state drives are data warehousing, online transaction processing (OLTP), batch, and back-up and recovery. Vertical markets where SSDs will likely resonate include the financial services sector, where a delayed trade can cost millions of dollars. Another sector where SSDs will resonate is in retail, where checkout speeds are absolutely critical to customer satisfaction. Additionally, the healthcare market is another key area for SSDs since there are mandates to digitize and store patient information for a period of time. Healthcare settings also present critical situations in which diagnostics such as x-rays—which are typically larger files—are needed. As a patient moves from department to department, larger files that are attached to patients’ records may need to be accessed quickly.

In my opinion, based on market observations, I expect continued growth of the solid state storage market as firms seek to reap the benefits of a faster VDI implementation, coupled with taking advantage of faster IOPs when analyzing data for their big data strategies.