The data storage market is about to enjoy one of the largest bursts in growth ever seen. Until today data growth and retention have been overlooked and ignored at several corporate levels. Many organizations lack any data retention policies. Documentation is needed to prove anything in court. It is also needed to protect companies that operate in risky industries. What about Governments, law firms and financial institutions how long should they keep data? Individuals and businesses alike are becoming “e-based” with everything they do including things as simple as sharing files and photographs. Data is getting larger and must be protected. Now is the time for SSD technology to be aggressive in the market if it truly is a ready for prime time player.
Solid state storage sounds like a great thing. Faster, quieter, fragmentation does not really affect performance, twice the data storage density, ability to endure more differences in environment like heat, altitude, vibration etc. but is it really a “ready for prime time player” and how long before it is? Will SSD make a large entry into the market playing another role other than main line storage? I believe there are still too many proprietary back end processes needed to make SSD in the enterprise a reality. Until the storage industry can adopt industry standards for Solid State data storage technology it will not live up to it’s potential.
There is a great deal of confusion in the SSD market and that will continue through 2010. As stated on storagesearch.com.
Advantages of SSDs outweigh any challenges that impact their practical implementation in enterprise storage systems. HDD manufacturers and enterprise storage system providers have already begun to offer SSD-based storage systems, but now they are beginning to deliver systems that use commodity flash, which is denser, and has higher error rates. To ensure that MLC flash-based enterprise SSDs deliver the same or better data integrity protection as HDDs, designers must take into account the differences in the way data is written, changed, and retrieved from these devices, and they must ensure that the SSD controller has appropriate data integrity protection techniques in place.
This is where the industry standards are needed in order to create confidence in the reliability and stability of SSD in the Enterprise. Until that happens and SSD research and development costs are recovered SSD will not live up to its potential in the storage industry. I believe widely adopted use of SSD in the enterprise is still 5-7 years away and the migration to solid state storage technology will take even longer. So for now I do not think there will be any substantial reduction in the use or sale of current HDD technology for the next 3-5 years in fact it will continue to increase rapidly.
Even when it does start to take hold it will be on an application by application basis and it will be the performance HDD segment that will be impacted not the mass storage segment. Conventional low cost storage may never be replaced by SSD technology based on value and cost. After all after a disk spins up there is practically no wear as long as it remains spinning.
Have more questions about SSDs or tiered storage? Feel free to email me or call me at 440-498-2300 ext 243.
-Jeff Sabella, Systems Engineer
