HP: SSD takeover is a long way off

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Solid State Drives (SSDs) may be a hot topic in the storage world at the moment but a senior executive from HP believes they have some way to go before they manage to replace standard hard drives.

Dave Roberson, senior vice president and general manager of HP's StorageWorks division, told IT PRO they may be great at performance but hard drives aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

During an interview at HP's Tech Forum in Las Vegas, he said: “Most of our products support [SSDs] today [but as to] when it will replace spinning disk? Not soon.”

Roberson claimed for cases where high performance computing was involved they may well be cost effective but added: “In terms of replacing spinning disk [it won't happen] in the near term.”

But how long until SSDs do take hold then?

“10 years,” he claimed. “Look at tape. Tape is still alive and well and my tape business I am very pleased with. We are selling more cartridges than ever before which is interesting [but] we are not selling more drives than ever before.”

Earlier in the day Roberson took to the stage at the Tech Forum and announced HP's new deduplication software called StoreOnce.

When another journalist said the product would cut those sales back, he concluded: “Its OK, they will buy our deduplication software instead. Its alright, the margins are better for deduplication software than they are for tape, I guarantee.”

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