SanDisk sets its sight on the over US$11 billion Flash array market with the announcement of its InfiniFlash storage system targeting applications that require massive capacity, extreme performance, and high reliability.

According to IDC, the market for flash-based arrays—both All Flash Arrays (AFA) and Hybrid Flash Arrays (HFA)—exhibited strong double digit growth over the past five years for a combined market that in 2014 was over $11.3B in size. This growth is largely being driven by rapid migration to 3rd platform computing infrastructure, resulting from the massive storage, compute power and scalability requirements of an increasingly mobile workforce, social media, big data analytics, and cloud computing.

“The creation of the new storage category of Big Data Flash will be a welcome development for 3rd platform computing customers that are struggling to meet the requirements of hyperscale environments with legacy HDD technologies,” said Eric Burgener, research director of IDC’s Storage Practice.

The InfiniFlash will be available in three configurations (IF100, IF500 and IF700). It can be configured with up to 64 specially-designed, hot-swappable cards, each providing an unprecedented 8TB of flash capacity to achieve 512TB of raw flash in a 3-rack unit. SanDisk also claims InfiniFlash will bring down the Flash prices to less than $1 per gigabyte (GB) without requiring compression or de-duplication technologies.

The InfiniFlash system’s modular storage design will support various operating system and storage stack offerings including SanDisk ION Accelerator software stack. For scale-out block and object storage workloads, InfiniFlash utilizes the ‘flash-intelligent’, open source CEPH platform to deliver enterprise-class data services.

InfiniFlash is targeted at hyperscale workloads such as big data analytics, content repositories and media streaming.

“Big Data Flash solutions consistently deliver sub-millisecond latencies, scale to hundreds of PBs, exhibit enterprise class reliability, availability, and serviceability, and bring the secondary economic benefits of flash deployment at scale to big data applications – all at a $/GB price point comparable to that of 15K RPM HDD systems. We believe products like InfiniFlash that offer an aggressively compelling price alternative to current scale-out HDD based architectures currently being used for big data applications, will succeed,” said IDC’s Burgener.