In January, the San Diego Supercomputer Center will debut Flash Gordon, the first flash memory-based supercomputer. It features 300 TB of flash that can perform 36 million IOPS. This achievement is a fitting way to kick off 2012, which will be the Year of SSD storage in the enterprise. While no one is declaring HDD dead, the transition to SSD storage has begun in earnest — especially in high-end enterprise storage. In fact, it is easy to see that over the next decade, SSDs will become the dominant storage media in the data center. Let’s take a look at some of the trends that are making this happen.
2012 TRENDS/FORCES HELPING DRIVE SSD ADOPTION
Enterprise revenues from SSDs will continue to grow
Organizations vote with their dollars. According to research firm IDC, revenue from SSD sales to enterprises in Q3 was$522 million, more than twice the dollar figure over the same period in 2010. There is no reason why that trend won’t continue, especially as vendors do a better job explaining SSD costs versus HDD costs.
Recently, Mark Bramfitt from storage analyst firm Wikibon stated:
“Solid-state storage is poised to enter mainstream use in data centers in the near term, driven by large potential performance advantages and supported by dropping cost premiums compared to disk-based systems.”
Media and online attention about SSDs is also increasing. A Google search for “SSD flash” yielded 14.6 million results during 2010. Searching the same phrase in 2011 gave you 112 million results. Trade publications such as Storage Magazine and INFOSTOR are putting SSD adoption among their 2012 storage trends. INFOSTOR’s Drew Robb wrote that SSDs continue “to represent one of the hottest areas of innovation in data storage.”
