The tiny chips that got their big break as components in the iPod Nano almost a decade ago are shaking up the $65 billion computer storage market. Spurred by insatiable demand for data analysis, companies such as Pure Storage, Tegile Systems, and Nimble Storage are adapting flash memory-the technology that stores songs in Apple's compact music players-for use in corporate computer centers. These newcomers are using flash to create systems that are faster and useless energy than older, disk-based storage sold by market leaders including EMC, NetApp, and Hewlett-Packard. Skullcandy, the Park City (Utah)-based maker of headphones, switched its data centers over to flash last year. "We'd reached the limit of what we could do with spinning disks," says Brent Allen, Skullcandy's information technology chief. Using Pure's flash system, the company now gets updates eight times a day on customer and market information, up from once a day when it used only EMC and NetApp equipment. That makes it easier for Skullcandy to respond to changes in consumer demand, Allen says. "For us, it's about analytics and getting it as up to date as we can."
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