Matt Wattles, enterprise infrastructure architect for Mitsubishi Power Systems Americas, didn't participate in TheInfoPro survey. But he said his organization did install an all-flash array from Nimbus Storage last December in order to address an I/O slowdown in his SAP environment.

Wattles initially tried putting a second set of processors in all of his SAP servers and bumped up the RAM to its maximum capacity, but the problem persisted. He finally narrowed the performance problem down to his terabyte-sized SAP database and loading data from primary storage, which at the time was an EVA array from Hewlett-Packard. The cost of adding SSDs to the EVA was more expensive than purchasing an all-flash array, Wattles said.

The Nimbus array with 2TB of storage capacity cost around $40,000, he said.

The superior performance of the flash storage on the Nimbus array not only eliminated the database bottleneck, it also slashed data backup times from four hours on the EVA to 15 minutes using the new flash array.

"I like the performance so far. There hasn't been a single glitch," he said. "I think got the array in one morning and had it up and running that afternoon. That's how easy it was."