Flash last longer than spinning disks
There is a truth out there. The idea flash "wears out" while hard drives do not may be true, but the time it takes flash to wear out is much longer than many anticipated. Long enough that the overwrite wear of flash actually takes longer in many cases than the physical wear out of hard drives (the upward curve of the HDD lifetime reliability "bathtub"). As a result, all-flash arrays can be amortized by customers over a much longer life cycle, meaning fewer refresh cycles.
This is hitting every storage array vendor who made a mint over the last 4 or 5 years replacing spinning disks with SSD based arrays.
Add to that over the last 5 years the number of organizations who have moved things like email to the cloud. There was a time an organization would dedicate an array to Microsoft Exchange. Not any more.
The overall storage array market is declining, and the refresh cycle is stretching out to 5 or 6 years. This means a reset of expectations, and a need to expand beyond traditional solution areas. That is a big contributor to the flattening growth curve of all-flash systems.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
