By Calvin Zito, @HPStorageGuy

It's time to get back to the topic of storage - as most of the regular readers of this blog know, I've been out for a few weeks dealing with my Mother's death.  Before I jump back into storage, I want to again thank everyone who was so kind to me.  I thank you very much - your kindness helped to get me through a difficult time.  Ok, so now onward....

There are a number of storage-focused groups on LinkedIn.  I noticed a conversation that was started on one of them discussing an article written by industry analyst George Crump.  The article itself was promoting a particular vendor but asked some good questions.  It covered a couple of different emerging technologies that could help reduce storage costs.  George makes the case that customers are buying more drives than they need from a capacity perspective to get the performance needed though I would argue that our EVA array minimizes this issue because of the built-in virtualization.  George suggests that SSD could help fill this gap but because it's still expensive compared to hard drive technology, it's not for everyone.  You can either read George's blog or read the conversation on LinkedIn to get the details of what he discussed.  Today, I wanted to highlight the answer that our own Tim Sheets gave.  Tim works in our Unified Storage Division managing portfolio strategy and marketing operations.  Here's what he had to say:

From a vantage point of a company that sells more HDD's than anyone else in the world, there are certainly changes on the horizon. SAS drives clearly offer an economic advantage and truth be told, the HDD manufacturers are trying to get away from FC drives because they are more expensive to produce. Now as for SSD's replacing FC drives... that is not going to happen wholesale at this time. The costs are too high, and there is still much to learn about the longer term reliability related to write cycles (SSD cells wear out at much lower cycles than traditional HDD's)  

While there is lots of work going on in the SSD market to manage write balancing, we cannot overlook the fact that there is much more work to be done to get to full enterprise reliability at volume economics. SLC is certainly more robust that MLC, but does not have the capacities of MLC. On the flip side, SLC has better write "wear-out" cycles than MLC. Either way, SSD costs are extremely high even when compared to FC HDDs. For now, I think we will primarily see SSD's in very high performance systems where customers are willing to pay a significant premium to get that performance. Texas Memory Systems and Fusion IO are good examples of this. However, we will not see mass adoption until the wear out rates become stable/proven and the costs drop dramatically. According to the SSD manufactures, that is still some time away for enterprise class drives.

Additionally, we will need to see the application developers modify their applications to take advantage of what SSD's can offer. Storage management/tuning tools will need to change in order to optimize storage environments using SSD's. And as Phillip from 3PAR notes above, storage tiering is critical here. (Editor's note: You'll have to go to the LinkedIn discussion to see what Phillip said). Today, solutions that are read intensive and need high IO rates are ideal for SSD. Write intensive applications are probably better off with rotating media for now if cost is a major factor.

All of this will take some time, as does adoption for most nascent technologies. SSD's will become more popular in certain applications, but the industry won't turn on a dime just yet. Longer term (3-5 years or more) they will begin to become more of a mainstream storage technology. For now, rotating media is here to say for a while.

Tim - I hope you don't mind me using your answer here for our readers.

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Posted 01-20-2010 11:15 PM by CalvinZ Filed under: Solid State Disk, SAS, storage