SanDisk announced its entry into the system storage market with an all-flash appliance (?Infiniflash?). While we?ve been bullish on
NAND?s ability to gain share versus the ~$4.0 billion performance HDD market, we believed that the cost/GB of NAND flash would preclude penetration into the ~$5.0 billion capacity optimized HDD market for the next several years
We see this as a function of the attractive economics of the array and the impressive data throughput and latency performance that makes it very compelling for moving large quantities of data inherent in big-data use cases such as data repositories, big-data analytics and media streaming. We believe that the market is currently served by capacity HDDs and hybrid flash arrays (?HFA?). However, considering the IO performance (780k sustained IOPS) possible with the array, we see no reason for the solution being employed for primary network storage use cases in the future.
SanDisk stated that the cost/GB for its Infiniflash architecture would be below $2.00/GB for an all-flash platform (including certain applications) without de-duplication or compression techniques (and <$1.00/GB for the raw hardware). We believe the company is able to produce at such low costs due to the density of the appliance (64 8TB cards per 3U chassis) and the use of captive NAND.
