More evidence of the $3bn flash boom

Astute Networks said 2013 was a year of "record achievement" for its networked flash products, including "significant strategic channel partner growth".

One new product in particular was its ViSX MLC flash offering, which it bills as enterprise-level flash at "a price comparable to spinning disk".

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Astute Networks nodded to a study from 451 Research, which surveyed hundreds of IT professionals from mid- to enterprise-sized organisations. The study said "over half of the respondents stated that their organisation had deployed flash, while a significant portion of the rest said they plan to do so in the next 18 months".

Simon Robinson, research vice president, storage, 451 Research, said: "The question for most IT managers is not whether they should deploy flash, but how they should deploy it. IT managers now have the opportunity to bring enterprise flash into their own infrastructures, accelerating the performance of key applications and in the process, also increasing efficiency through power/cooling and real estate savings."

Jeff Whitney, vice president of marketing, Astute Networks, said: "Application performance has become priority number one, in order to drive productivity and value from critical tier one applications - followed closely by availability, reliability, and cost control."

"In response to our continued innovation and leadership in the flash storage market, combined with the projected $3 billion solid state flash/SSD market opportunity, Astute Networks has enjoyed enviable growth across every facet of the business this past year - particularly in regards to building relationships with world-class channel partners," added Whitney.

According to Astute, ViSX appliance "dramatically accelerates" SQL Server, SharePoint and virtual desktop applications across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

"ViSX solutions use performance-optimised flash rather than traditional capacity-optimised disks," reported the vendor, adding that the solution connect using "pervasively deployed" ethernet networks via standard iSCSI protocol. ViSX is VMware Ready Certified.