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.”

The storage efficiency gap between SSD and HDD will grow in 2012
You can already make a strong case that SSD SAN storage offers more performance than SAN HDD storage at less cost. If you measure IOPS by cost today, SSD storage already wins hands down. Expect hardware and software innovations this year to ratchet up SSD value even further. Also, don’t forget to factor physical and environmental cost savings when comparing SSDs with HDDs. SSDs can reduce your data center heating and cooling costs and your space requirements. Wikibon’s Bramfitt continues:

“Avoiding just one watt of power use on your raised floor helps avoid the capital cost of securing new data center facility capacity — worth as much as $2 with today’s construction costs. Add another dollar-per-year in energy costs to support that watt.” These SSD advantages will drive SSD adoption to accelerate.

High availability and data protection advancements will enhance SSD value
To many organizations, high availability and data protection are equally as important as speed. A little latency may not kill them, but a crashed system might. The market will innovate in 2012 with products that enhance HA and provide users with greater flexibility to ensure their data is protected. Speed will become less of a differentiator among SSD offerings because all SSDs are inherently fast. A key factor here will be how do you do snaps and replication fast enough to keep up with this ultra-low latency storage? It is likely that data protection capabilities will play a key role in shaping this market’s winners and losers in 2012.

“Big data” will crush traditional SAN storage controllers
Legacy SAN storage that houses and operates HDDs were not designed for what we call big data. It cannot keep up with today’s big and powerful servers. If you built an array from scratch today with big data in mind, you would architect and optimize it for SSDs. You’d build something like the Kaminario K2 SPEAR. We believe the industry will start to recognize the limitations of traditional SAN storage and start to follow Kaminario’s lead. End users will start to recognize that throwing more disks at a performance problem will only lead to more problems, not solve them.

Another impact of big data is that it puts increasing strain on applications such as large Oracle databases. These apps have all kinds of dependencies that impact performance (e.g. massive IO wait times). This is another area where SSDs offer benefits over HDDs. In 2012, look for more evidence about how SSDs can accelerate application performance and improve the user experience.

SSDs will become the media of choice for storage virtualization
If you are looking to consolidate your resources while optimizing the utilization of what you have, then powerful SSDs just make the most sense for storage virtualization. The SSD industry is aware that virtualization offers real growth opportunities. You will hear more companies in 2012 discuss SSD virtualization prowess, especially in the era of the cloud.

SPEAR and other innovations will enable MLC flash to marginalize SLC flash
While SLC flash is generically faster than MLC flash, it costs much more. Technologies such as Kaminario’s SPEAR are increasingly able to generate more and more speed and reliability from MLC flash chips at less cost. Because of this, SLC flash use is likely to become limited to small, niche applications.

The net of all this is that SSD storage will move into the data center in a big way in 2012. It will be the year of SSD Enterprise Storage.

Tags: application performance, Database Performance, DRAM, enterprise storage, Flash, Kaminario, solid-state SAN storage, SSD, Storage Performance, storage predictions, virtualization