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Origin Storage: Solid State Drive technology taking off as enterprise users adopt the technology
May 2010 by Origin Storage
A report just released says that solid state drives (SSDs) are taking off in the enterprise server sector, largely as a result of the fact that high-performance SSDs can better meet the needs of enterprise and storage area network (SAN) users than magnetic hard drive units.
According to Andy Cordial, managing director with Origin Storage, the report from Objective Analysis - entitled `Enterprise SSDs: Technologies & Markets’ - predicts that the market for enterprise SSDs will grow from 150,000 units in the current year to more than 4.1 million units by the time 2015 rolls around.
"That’s a growth rate of 90 per cent per annum, which will complemented by a annual revenue growth rate of 55 per cent, which reflects the rapid take-up and the falling prices that we are continuing to see in the SSD marketplace," he said.
"If you delve into the report, you find that the magnetic hard drive market is predicted to shrink considerably over the next five years, with the slack being more than taken up by SSD technology," he added.
The managing director of the storage systems integration specialist says that the report’s conclusions that the falling price of flash memory is helping to reduce the price of SSDs parallels his observations in what has become a fast-moving marketplace.
SSDs, he explained, have many benefits in the enterprise and SAN marketplace, not the least of which is their ability to handle more data at much lower latencies than their magnetic counterparts.
When you factor in these advantages with the take-up of transaction processing systems which, as the report says, are experiencing healthy growth at the moment - a situation that is expected to continue for the foreseeable future - you can see why volumes and revenues are taking off at the moment.
"It’s interesting that the report notes that SSDs - in the enterprise market at least - are still in their infancy. The growth we are observing in the market is incredible, as we’re also seeing firms such as Intel and Kingston releasing SSDs in lower capacities of around the 30 gigabyte mark, allowing them to be used as boot drives," he said.
"This significantly speeds the boot-up cycle for those applications where speed of recovery from a power-down is of importance. Add in the speed advantages that SSDs offer in the transaction processing environment and it’s no small wonder that the market for the technology is taking off," he added.
