Sun aims to flood servers with solid-state drives
In a bid to remove hard drives from servers, Sun on Tuesday announced that
it will offer solid-state drives (SSDs) later this year as a replacement for
spinning disk drives.
Flash-based SSDs will improve application performance on servers and save on
energy costs by consuming up to five times less energy than hard drives, the
company said. Flash drives are also known to be more rugged than hard drives
as they have no moving parts.
By mid-2009, flash SSD will be on most servers, said John Fowler, vice president
of the systems group at Sun. It will deliver more storage capacity than RAM
and improve overall server performance, Fowler said.
Barring datacenters, the adoption of flash storage has been slow in the enterprise
due to high cost per gigabyte. A 128G-byte SSD costs US$460, or $3.58 per gigabyte,
compared to $60 for a 160G-byte hard drive, said Krishna Chander, senior analyst
at iSuppli. It will take three to four years for SSDs to come to parity with
hard drives on price, Chander said.
However, as opposed to Fibre Channel hard disk drives, which is witnessing
a 40 percent year-on-year price decline, flash-based SSDs price per gigabyte
is falling between 50 to 70 percent annually, Fowler said. As the prices fall,
SSDs will ship in larger volumes, Fowler said.
Sun's SSDs will be optimized for MySQL database and other leading applications,
according to the company. The drive will work with Solaris ZFS (Zettabyte File
Systems), the file system for the Solaris OS.
The drives will start shipping in the second half of this year. Pricing information
or storage capacity of the SSD drives was not immediately available. Sun said
users will be able to try the drive for 60 days before buying it.
A number of companies recently announced in the SSD storage products. Intel
on Tuesday introduced an 8G-byte SSD and said it would make a 16G-byte SSD available
in the fourth quarter of this year. Seagate last week said it would offer SSDs
to top tier companies starting next year.
IDG News Service
Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.
Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.
Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.
Enterprise 2.0 Implementation
By Aaron C. Newman, Jeremy Thomas
Published by McGraw-Hill
Learn more!
Deploying Cisco Wide Area Application Services
By Zach Seils, Joel Christner
Published by Cisco Press
Learn more!
