Flash storage industry: confusing or what?

Over the last year or so, there has been a flurry of new entrants in the storage industry. Many of these vendors utilise flash in some way with some breaking significant new ground in offering new opportunities for data centre managers to optimise their environment.

And customers are getting more confused and frustrated with our industry because of the lack of clear market segmentation between the various solutions e.g:

- Server-resident flash: very high IOPS, very low latency and capacity (vendor, vendor, vendor, etc)

- Storage-networked, all-flash array: very high IOPs, low latency and moderate capacity (vendor, vendor, vendor, etc)

- Storage-networked array: high IOPs, low latency but high capacity (Nexenta, Nimble, Tegile, etc).

Will this confusion end? Will the industry consolidate? How long before end users can make educated, knowledgeable decisions on flash?