Summary
* The enterprise market is one of the brightest niches for solid state drives SSDs can be used in enterprise Tier 0 applications where fast reading (and writing) can enable important content delivery and transaction applications * These Tier 0 enterprise applications allow faster creation and use of content, thus increases overall demand for digital storage capacity * Although many companies have introduced SSD products for the enterprise market only a few of these have gained market share * Without creating standards for SSD products the growth of SSDs in the enterprise market will be hampered.
Analysis
SSDs have received some deserved publicity for wins in the enterprise storage market but they have also gotten a bad rap from some poorer performing products introduced into the market. In some cases vendors claim much more capability and reliability than their products have been able to deliver. In a conservative market like the enterprise storage market not being able to deliver on what you promise can hurt you.
The applications where SSDs are finding the most traction in the Enterprise market are in high performance, or so called Tier 0, applications. These applications need the data throughput that flash-based SSDs can offer despite the much higher $/GB than HDDs. Many enterprise storage companies such as EMC, IBM, Sun and others have introduced SSDs in enterprise storage systems.
Standards are needed to help make enterprise SSD product claims more credible and testable. Standards that are needed include SSD performance metrics and test methods, endurance and reliability within real-work enterprise environments. These products must allow for substitution and interoperability and this requires standards to establish these common operations. Because the data inside of SSDs has a different architecture and operation that that in HDDs, SSDs need their own standards based upon their unique characteristics.
Organizations such as JEDEC and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) are working to develop standards. Members of these SSD standard efforts come from SSD companies as well as HDD companies. In many cases HDD companies are also getting into the SSD business (Hitachi HST, Western Digital and Seagate for instance). Since HDD engineers have many years of enterprise storage experience this cooperation between the two storage technologies will benefit both types of storage.
