Solid-State Disks Invading Storage World

by Chris Preimesberger

Fusion-io, which is working on handheld-size solid-state storage arrays that the company claims can do the same enterprise-level heavy lifting as conventional rack arrays, has been making a lot of news lately. In February it signed Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist, and earlier in March it announced it had already doubled the capacity of its front-line product to 640GB. A 1.28TB version is due out later in 2009.

Dell’s new EqualLogic PS6000S arrays, which become available in April, have dedicated controllers for the SSD drives (no other vendor does this) and can be combined together to scale performance linearly. They support up to 500TB of storage per PS Series group.

Western Digital will now able to leverage SiliconSystems’ know-how and IP to accelerate its development of SSD computing solutions. This acquisition combined with WD’s branding and client relationships could make WD a formidable SSD vendor and it validates the market opportunity provided by SSDs, according to solid-state storage analyst Gregory Wong of Forward Insights.

EMC now has made SSDs (in 500MB, 750MB and 1TB capacities) available for virtually any model from its three enterprise storage array lines: Symmetrix, Clariion and Celerra. Pictured here is the new Symmetrix DMX-4. Solid-state disks are particularly valuable in a data center for high-transaction applications, such as financial services and online retail.

Kingston Technology’s DataTraveler II Plus Migo Edition solid-state thumb drive, with storage software from Migo Software, is a multifunctional USB flash drive that is designed to carry a person’s entire desktop— including Outlook and browser preferences—plus all of that user’s designed files in mobile fashion. The password-protected drive is available in 2GB, 4GB and 8GB capacities and leaves no trace of personal data on the host computer.

SanDisk, while having a number of corporate sales and marketing issues thanks to the recession, nonetheless keeps coming up with more and more advanced products. This Extreme IV CompactFlash card features 45MB per second throughput and 16GB storage for photos or video. Capacities and throughputs are only going to continue to improve in the next two to three years, analysts say.