Written by by George Crump, Lead Analyst for Storage Switzerland. High-performance flash-based storage has dramatically improved the storage infrastructure’s ability to respond to the demands of servers and the applications that count on it. Nowhere does this improvement have more potential than in the virtualized-server environment. The performance benefits of flash are so great that it can be deployed indiscriminately and still performance gains can be seen. But doing so may not allow the environment to take full advantage of flash performance. It may also be a much more expensive deployment model and put data at risk. Modern data centers need to understand which forms of flash and which deployment models will show the greatest return on investment while not risking any data.