With the cost of SSDs rapidly declining, it’s tempting to position them in every new server or storage system. Not so fast.

Silicon is the darling of the storage world: Out with spinning disks, in with flash chips. There’s a lot to love about solid-state storage. It offers faster I/O, lower latency and gear consumption, and instant-on from sleep states for lightning-fast access to cold data, all from smaller components easily adapted to a lot of form factors. Indeed, flash memory’s miniscule use of space and tool are a key enabler of mobile devices and the explanation SSDs are displacing HDDs in most laptops.

But in datacenters, where storage requirements are measured in petabytes, not terabytes, flash should be used opportunistically. Despite the claims of a few solid-state proponents, the all-flash datacenter remains to be years from becoming a reality, as described in InformationWeek’s 2014 State of Storage report. However the price per bit differential between flash and disk is narrowing, albeit from a terribly wide gap, meaning it’s rational and economical to take advantage of SSDs in additional and more applications.

There are four major categories of flash product: server-side PCIe cards and SSDs, hybrid flash-HDD storage arrays, and all-flash systems using either SSDs or proprietary memory cards. The State of Storage survey found that 40% of respondents utilize SSDs in arrays, up 8 points since 2013.

However, all-flash arrays are still a spot, deployed by only 16%, with a trifling 3% using them extensively. Thirty-nine percent of respondents use solid state in servers, up 10 points, with the overwhelming majority (83%) selecting SSDs over PCIe adapters. But server deployments are still selective, with almost two-thirds of respondents using solid state in not more than 20% in their servers.

Read the remainder of this story on Network Computing.

Kurt Marko is an InformationWeek and Network Computing contributor and IT industry veteran, pursuing his passion for communications after a varied career that has spanned virtually the whole high-tech food chain from chips to systems. Upon graduating from Stanford University … View Full Bio

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