Solid state disk (SSD) technology started showing up on the enterprise storage radar earlier this year and the topic has really gained momentum in the last few weeks. This is a very interesting topic that I have been keeping my eye on. One of the key debates to monitor is the “Is it disk or is it cache?” question.

EMC, IBM, and HDS announced support for SSD as primary storage earlier in the year. Most of the other major vendors have made some type of announcement at this point as well.
http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/us/2008/011408-1.htm
http://www.hds.com/corporate/press-analyst-center/press-releases/2008/gl080519.html
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/24996.wss

And in the last couple weeks…

NetApp announced they are working on SSD for both read cache and primary storage with blog entries to accompany it:
http://www.netapp.com/us/company/leadership/data-center-transformation/dct-flash.html
http://blogs.netapp.com/shadeofblue/2008/11/both-disk-and-c.html

Sun announced their next generation 7000 series NAS platform using SSD for read and write cache: (Don’t ask me what OpenStorage is. I still can’t figure out what it is besides a marketing term.)
http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/index.jsp

The Sun NAS development team has been pumping out blog postings all week:
http://blogs.sun.com/fishworks

And Chuck Hollis had a blog post on Monday that conveniently coincided with the Sun announcement:
http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2008/11/back-to-flash-again.html#more

It looks like this could be one of the hottest the storage topics of 2009. We are in the process of bringing some equipment in for testing and will post test results as soon as we have them.

1. Benchmarking and ‘real FC’
2. Sun Storage 7000 Analytics Overview
3. Why Oracle is NOT going to sell off Sun’s hardware business