Businesses Set To Ramp Up SSD Usage

A new report from storage researcher, Storage Strategies Now (SSG-Now), has revealed that a healthy future for solid state drives (SSDs) and high-speed memory.

Entitled “Solid State Drives and High-Speed Memory: Adoption, Practice and Deployment,” the report defines solid state storage, outlines its explosive growth, and details how businesses are adopting and deploying solid state storage for rapid access to transactional data, the cloud and virtual desktop infrastructures.

The report also includes the results of an IT Professionals Adoption Survey, co-sponsored by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), which presents information on the status of solid state drives and high-speed memory.

Survey Findings

The survey found more than 70 percent of respondents are planning to deploy solid state drives and high-speed memory, with 25 percent already implemented, 32 percent evaluating and 31 percent currently implementing the technology.

Speeding access to transactional, structured data is the driver to solid state drives for 46 percent of the respondents, followed by use as Tier 0 storage for primary data by 40 percent and storage bursting for 37 percent and 51 percent of the respondents are familiar or very familiar with the efforts of SNIA in advancing solid state storage performance standards.

“The IT Professionals Solid State Drive and High-Speed Memory Adoption Survey sheds new light on how organisations will deploy solid state storage and high-speed memory,” says Deni Connor, founding analyst for SSG-Now. “Among the findings are that 51 percent of the respondents will deploy solid state storage or high-speed memory in the next year and 38 percent have implemented Pie-based adapter in server systems.”

The report outlines technology solutions from more than 55 hardware and software vendors and organisations with Tier 0 and storage IO initiatives.

Comparing SSDs

It also includes detailed product validation and pricing information and real-world use case scenarios, as well as best practices for selecting, deploying and managing solid state storage.

Information for this report was obtained through a number of sources including vendor questionnaires and interviews, end-user interaction, available market data and a survey of IT professionals, conducted in the second quarter of 2011.

“With the SNIA Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification (SSS PTS) for Enterprise and Client test suites, solid state device vendors and system vendors alike have found great value in being able to uniformly compare and contrast different manufacturer’s product capabilities,”  said Wayne Adams, chairman of the SNIA’s Board of Directors.