It’s easy to get overwhelmed trying to grasp the rapidly growing and evolving SSD market, particularly with the constant announcements of new products, players, and architectures, and the competing claims of vendors and technology proponents. If you’re finding the whole SSD business a bit hard to follow then you should take a look at the recently released report from Storage Strategies NOW entitled Solid State Drives and High Speed Memory: Adoption, Practice, and Deployment,  partially sponsored by Kaminario.

 The report contains 58 pages of survey results, market projections, technology and vendor comparisons, architectures, best practices, testing information, and case studies from an analyst firm that was following the SSD market years before everyone and his cousin was talking about it. It’s full of good information and, despite a length that may seem intimidating, is an easy, quick read. You’ll find clear, concise answers to just about all your questions about Flash, DRAM, SLC, MLC, caching, tiering, wear leveling, interfaces, and more, as well as an interesting use case involving Digital Trowel’s use of the Kaminario K2 to accelerate the cleaning and matching of more than 10 billion records.

But perhaps most enlightening are the results of Storage Strategies NOW’s survey of IT professionals that show just how big this market is and will become in the next few years. Among other things,

• The report predicts that by 2015 the enterprise SSD market will grow more than fivefold from approximately $1 billion in 2011 to $5.4 billion.

• 55 percent of respondents either have already implemented or are in the process of implementing SSD or high-speed memory solutions at their organization. Another 32 percent were evaluating products at the time of the survey.

• More than 82 percent of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that adopting SSD or high speed memory devices helped them achieve a specific business objective.

• Another 73 percent said it enabled them to respond faster to business needs.

The three biggest application uses for SSD in 2011 were database, transactional structured data (45.5 percent) OLTP (42.7 percent) and high performance computing (42.6 percent).

It’s an exciting time for SSD but there’s a lot happening and it can get confusing. Use this report to get a handle on all the technologies and issues you’ve been reading about.

Tags: caching, database, DRAM, Flash, high performance computing, high-speed memory, interfaces, K2, Kaminario, MLC, OLTP, SLC, SSD, SSD architecture, ssd market, Storage Strategies NOW, tiering, transactional structured data, wear leveling