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Setting Your Sights on SSDs: Page 4 of 5

What about Flash Drives in storage system such as CLARiiON, IBM DS4000, LSI, and Sun 6X40?

Clearly, Sun, Hitachi, and others are intending to deploy flash drives within mid-tier product offerings. Press is reporting that EMC will implement flash drive technology in the CLARiiON platform soon; however, cost factors and the mid-tier market users will dictate the adoption/acceptance rate of flash drives.

There are plenty of SMB mission-critical applications that can benefit from the performance increase provided by flash drives. In fact, this kind of technology in the SMB space may have a game-changing effect for a business and provide a competitive edge for the early adopter.

Are server vendors using Flash inside the servers?

You bet they are, and one of the best places to implement flash technology is within a blade server to increase the effective utilization of the processor and accomplish write tasks faster. I anticipate HP, Sun, IBM, and others to increasingly use flash memory as cloud computing becomes more the norm over the next three years; however, I encourage them to look closely at what STEC has done and build in the reliability, provisioning, and resilience required for enterprise-class utilization.