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Solid-state storage fixes datacenter bottlenecks
Wednesday, 10 February 2010, 18:58 IST
Bangalore: More and more datacenter operators have been struggling with enterprise bottlenecks not of their own making. Servers' hard disk access times have not kept up with the increasing speed of their CPUs, and the resulting lags can be a limiting factor in some database and caching applications, particularly those involving software as a service and cloud computing. However, now you have solid-state drives (SSD) that can fix these bottlenecks, reports Computer World.
As these applications become even more popular, the bottleneck is likely to get worse, analysts predict. And the database appliances designed to target the problem, which have been on the market for years, remain expensive.
According to Computer World, until recently, the high cost of flash memory limited it to consumer items with relatively low storage capacities, like digital cameras and MP3 players. The flash prices have declined an average of 60 percent a year - a rate that's "faster than has ever happened in the world of semiconductors," according to In-Stat, a market research firm in Scottsdale, Ariz.
While solid-state drives are still early in the adoption curve, analysts predict an increase in the use of SSDs in the enterprise. At its annual datacenter conference in December 2009, research firm Gartner called flash-based solid-state storage as one of the most important technologies of 2010.
