Sun will bung flash drives in most of its servers

SUN MICROSYSTEMS will be including a 32GB flash SSD storage unit in almost every server it sells by the end of the year, the company predicted earlier this week.

Although rotating disks are much less expensive than flash by volume of data, Sun claims that solid-state disk (SSD) storage is far faster and cheaper than physical disk drives on a per-I/O basis. Sun says that makes flash storage very attractive for applications that do a lot of I/O operations.

At a press conference in Boston on Tuesday, John Fowler, the chief of Sun's servers and storage division, said "[Flash] consumes one-fifth the power and is a hundred times faster [than disk drives]. The fact that it's not the same dollars per gigabyte is perfectly OK."

Sun indicated that it will offer flash storage in nearly any server by the end of the calendar year. "That's the easiest place to put it, because you have a high-performance I/O subsystem that's very close," Fowler said.

Fowler foresaw users combining relatively small amounts of flash-based storage with large disk arrays. The fast SSD storage will be used to hold high-activity data while the disk drives contain less volatile data.

He predicted that most server buyers building I/O-intensive applications will use some amount of flash within the year. Fowler opined that databases like Oracle, MySQL and IBM DB2 are prime candidates for the use of SSDs, due to their logging and caching needs. µ

See Also
Seagate preps first SSDs
Samsung delivers speediest and biggest SSD at 256GB
Intel to bundle SSDs with Centrino 2 - report
Toshiba wants half of SSD market

L'Inq
Network World