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A Solid Future

Solid-state disks will become integral to many enterprise storage infrastructures

Thanks to its use in popular devices such as cell phones, MP3 players and laptop computers, flash memory is quickly becoming a common consumer-storage medium. Many people use small, dedicated flash drives to carry files.

Little wonder, then, why companies are curious how flash memory, in one form or another, can fit into their IT infrastructures and benefit their larger, overall business goals. The easy answer might be that flash memory is faster than hard-drive disks (HDDs) and processes more transactions with higher I/O throughput.

Nothing is ever that simple. After all, HDDs have been at the center of enterprise storage for 50 or so years, and they’re not going away in the foreseeable future. This is in part because of the relative per GB costs of HDDs versus those of flash-based solid-state disks (SSDs). Although the gap is closing, SSDs still cost more than comparatively sized HDDs.

Recent advances in storage technology are making SSDs a viable complement to HDD-based storage configurations. This is especially true in high-transaction, small-data environments, where time from query to response has to be faster than that allowed by spinning hard disks. As a result, any higher upfront costs associated with SSDs can be justified by the technology’s unique characteristics, beyond those typically associated with HDDs.

“When you deploy these types of smart technologies, you can improve the life for the entire DRAM/flash drive to three to five years.” —Clod Barrera, chief technical strategist, IBM System Storage

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