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Since all-flash arrays first came to market, IT professionals have considered the inherent possibilities in the concept of a flash-only data center. Such a data center would instantly respond not only to production databases but to unstructured data requests, archive recalls and even backup and restore tasks. The idea is appealing, but is the all-flash data center realistic? An all-flash data center seems reasonable for several good reasons. First, flash enterprise storage has dropped in price over the last five years. Second, data reduction technologies, such as deduplication and compression, work well in a flash environment because the excess performance of flash allows these processes to run with almost no noticeable impact on users and applications. The result is the typical all-flash array can benefit from a three- to five-times increase in data efficiency. The third reason for an all-flash data center is that flash drives and modules can deliver unprecedented densities -- 16 TB drives are common, and 50 TB and higher ...