Solid- state flash storage is one of today's most important "old yet new" IT technologies. It's old in the sense that some form of solid-state memory has been around since the 1970s. Flash technology arose in the 1980s, and modern flash drives within enterprise storage subsystems arrived on the market back in 2008, with various types of flash-card packaging being the latest turn of the technology crank.

Flash storage is new because the ongoing advances in performance, density, and other factors are still continuing to help flash take over an increasing number of performance-sensitive workloads from conventional spinning-desk arrays.