Are Flash Solid-State Disk Drives Ready for the Enterprise?

Conclusion

Increasing reliability and performance requirements in military, industrial and enterprise applications are pushing data storage standards to unprecedented levels. High bandwidth, mobility, and "zero downtime" are becoming common IT must haves. As magnetic hard disk drives reach performance limitations, Solid State Flash Drives are expected to play a critical role in meeting industry demand for fast, reliable yet economical data storage due to their impressive line up of inherent and built-in characteristics, as well as the continuous down spiraling cost of Flash memory.

How does a 3.5-inch form factor Solid State Flash Drives with capacities of up to 600 GBytes at a cost of $10 per GByte sound? Regardless how unlikely that seems, they are poised to become reality by 2008/9. Consider further the unprecedented strides being taken to improve transfer rates, from 68MBytes/sec in 2004 to 1,600 MBytes/sec in 2008 for a 3.5-inch Solid State Flash Drive and from 110,000 IOPS in 2004 to 2,000,000 IOPS in 2008 for a 2U rack mount system. These innovations will install solid-state Flash drives as the next disruptive technology in the IT landscape, sweeping enterprise storage off its feet by providing faster access to information at a lower overall cost of ownership.

About the Author

Marius Tudor is Director for Business Development at BiTMICRO Networks. You may contact him at 1 (510) 743-3412 or send an email at marius.tudor@bitmicro.com.

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