STA

Author: Harry Mason, President, SCSI Trade Association
Director of Industry Marketing, LSI Corp.

SSDs are low-latency storage devices that are finding their way into workstations, servers, and networked storage devices. Many of the uses for these devices are found in system-level caching environments, however recent cost improvements have made SSDs attractive for accelerating applications such as database searches.

Author: Sam Sawyer, Director of Product Marketing
Embedded Storage Products
Emulex Corporation

Introduction
One of the hottest topics in storage is the adoption of solid state disks (SSDs) within external storage arrays. Over the last decade, advances in hard disk drive (HDD) capacity have far outpaced the random IOPS capability of HDDs, providing a catalyst for the increased adoption of SSDs. Inherent in the mechanical nature of HDDs is a latency that creates a significant bottleneck in the movement of data to and from the storage array. Common methods of improving the IOPS capability in storage systems include high-rotational speed HDDs and striping the data across additional disk drives, yet these approaches do not dramatically improve IOPS performance. Instead, they result in a dramatic increase in power consumption. SSD technology, by contrast, can vastly improve IOPS performance (by a factor of up to 1,000) while reducing total power consumption of a storage array.

Author: Ashish Nadkarni, Principal Consultant
GlassHouse Technologies

Flash drives, also known as solid state drives, have a promising future in the enterprise space. They promise to overcome literally all limitations of traditional hard drives - power consumption, heat dissipation, mean time between failures, speed and IO/s, etc. The list is long. There is no doubt that eventually they will replace all rotational hard drives in the enterprise space, as well as the consumer market. If you have bought into the promise of solid state drives and are planning to invest in it right away, hold your plans for now. The technology should be continually researched to figure out how to best help your environment, stopping short of actually buying anything - yet. The technology is seemingly mature but still has to establish itself in the enterprise space. Then, and only then, will it become viable as a replacement technology for spindle-based drives.