Sun: 2008 "tipping point" for SSD technology

Sun is aiming for a leadership position in the Solid State Drives (SSD) arena, by announcing new product lines of flash drives and backing them with significant developments on the software side. The company claims it is the first major systems vendor to add an end-to-end Flash-based disk product line to its portfolio, giving customers 3x better performance at one-fifth the energy consumption of spinning disk drive offerings.

The company will be adding an "SSD-inside" option to all their new servers, in the hope that performance and efficiency benefits will outweigh the higher price, per GB, of the new storage medium. Sun's Flash SSD technologies are optimized for theMySQL database, the Solaris operating system and the innovative ZFS file system.

A Sun press release quotes John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc., as saying: "Flash SSD is the most exciting innovation to happen to system and storage design in over a decade. By mid-2009, it will be in the majority of servers and deliver more capacity than DRAM and far greater overall system performance and energy efficiency. This technology will completely change how server and storage infrastructure is designed and deployed in enterprise data centers."

After the appearance of SSD in mainstream products, and the apparent interest of other big companies in this relatively new technology, it seems that solid state memory is making the jump from novelty consumer items to the data center.