One company to watch in this space: Violin Memory. The company's Terabyte-Scale Memory Appliance provides over 1Gbit/sec. access for sequential and random-access. SLAC's Mount says he tested a DRAM-based prototype appliance from Violin, and that its upcoming flash-based system "seems a good match for our applications."
A Violin spokesman explains that the two key bottlenecks in corporate computing are network speeds and IOPS for storage systems. Today, disks run at about 100Mbit/sec. for sequential operations, but only 1Mbit/sec. for random 4k blocks, he says.
"In some cases, there are minimal capacity requirements which are well suited for SSDs," Janukowicz adds. "Also, in high-performance applications, the IOPS metrics can favor SSDs over HDDs." However, even with all those benefits, he says that "IDC does not see SSDs completely replacing HDDs in servers. SSDs do offer performance advantages and are a 'green' solution. However, there are many applications that require the capacity provided by HDDs."
Enterprise Strategy Group's Peters says that throughput requirements will lead to a gradual shift away from hard disk drives to solid-state technology, but it will take time in the corporate world. "Moving wholeheartedly from one technology to another is a rare thing within data centers," he says.
John Brandon worked in IT management for 10 years before starting a full-time writing career. He can be reached at jbrandonbb@gmail.com.