The SSD market has been bubbling up since the beginning of the year with a lot of new players, products, and technologies flowing into the market like a mighty stream. It’s exciting and interesting to see how many companies are getting into the act and the different market categories beginning to take shape.

Let’s start with server-side SSD cache solutions, given that  storage giant EMC has made a big splash there with its Project Lightning VFCache product. Server-side cache-supposedly saves the customer some money and protects an existing disk storage investment—which is probably why EMC is all hot over it. The theory is that by using SSD as a cache for the most heavily accessed data, you get a good balance between cost and performance. You also get to take advantage of fast PCI performance. But unlike a pure PCI SSD solution, a server-side SSD cache can pull data from the entire storage environment, rather than just a single server. The positives make sense, but the drawback is that most of these solutions are read-only caches, so you do nothing for fast writes, and they add more complexity to your storage environment than an all-SSD solution. In this category, new solutions from OCZ, and Fusion-io have also shipped recently.

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