Through SNIA's latest international initiative, the movement toward wider use and adoption of solid-state storage technologies will likely gain speed, said Mills.
Another goal of the project, is "making sure that the IT workers get the needed knowledge on the technology" so they can integrate it into their workplaces, said Vincent Franceschini, who's chairman of the SNIA board of directors. "That's the overall mandate."
Mills said that even as solid-state storage use grows, he doesn't expect the demise of traditional platter-based storage drives in the foreseeable future.
"What we see is that solid-state storage will eat into the performance end" of the market," Mills said. "That's where we see solid-state drives making a big play in the market, in those performance situations."
Mark Peters, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said the initiative will greatly help to educate enterprise IT users about solid-state storage and its benefits, as well as bring together manufacturers to work on standards that will benefit them all.
"I think it's good that SNIA's doing it," said Peters, who recently joined SNIA. "They have a great reputation, they represent all the right people, and they're trusted."
Getting carried away, though, is one danger faced by the new initiative, he said. "The solid-state thing -- anyone who tells you that solid-state is going to replace spinning disks" is over the top, Peters said. "It's not going to replace spinning disks, but it is one of the biggest changes coming to the storage industry."
Solid-state storage will allow enterprises that need increased system I/O performance to better match faster storage to faster processors to reap the full benefits of both, Peters said. "The whole thing is about economics. As we gradually get to the point when you put more storage closer to the processing... in terms of performance and speed, that's a good thing. The newest CPUs are fast, and we're still serving them with 1930s Chevys for storage."