SNW 08: Is SSD ready for enterprise?

Solid state disks (SSD) may be the latest thing for enterprise storage, but vendors have a few challenges to overcome before mass market adoption, according to an analyst for IDC.

Jeff Janukowicz, research manager for hard disk drive (HDD) and SSD, told attendees of Storage Networking World in Orlando today that "In the past year, there's been a lot of news, hype and misunderstandings about SSD," he said.

Enterprises require performance and good up-time - two features SSD offers as a platform - but also data integrity and capacity. Corporate buyers will also be considering acquisition cost, lifetime total cost of ownership, and the reputation and support of vendors.

Fans tout the faster access and low latency of SSD, as well as the inherent reliability of a product with no moving parts. But Janukowicz also stressed the energy effecient side. Most SSD products use less energy and create less heat, he said. "That's very interesting in the enterprise market," he added, echoing previous SNW speakers who stressed the importance of storage going green.

SSD can also tolerate a wide temperature range, shocks and vibrations and create no noise, all of which could be key deciding factors for certain companies.

But it's not all good news, Janukowicz said. A main challenge is the relatively high price compared to HDD. He also cited concerns about write performance and reliability over the hundreds of thousands of cycles in a corporate data centre. "Is this going to be an issue when its put into the data centre?" he wondered.

Because of such challenges, SSD is still in the early stages of market adoption, but it will see strong growth. Janukowicz said SSD can be used to create products which fit the gaps between other storage methods, for tasks which are over or underserved by HDD.

He also said the green angle could help make up the difference in price, with savings on power usage making up the difference between other storage systems. While SSD is more expensive on a dollar per gigabyte ratio than traditional systems, it might be better per I/O or per watt, he said. "Including those metrics, [SSD] can be competitive in situations today," Janukowicz said.

While he said it shouldn't just be seen as a niche technology, SSD could used to boost other systems. "We do think it's a good fit for certain applications," Janukowicz said. "It's not just for niche applications, but finding a wider space in the market." He said it's useful for tiered storage and volume suppliers, he said, as well as for low capacity applications such as servers or boot servers, or for I/O intense workloads, such as customer relationships management applications.

Because of this, IDC expect to see more products being adopted this year. "We're very optimistic about the SSD market," Janukowicz said.

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