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Almost every IT professional I talk to wants to use solid state drives (SSDs) in some way to solve performance problems. The most common culprit is the random I/O caused by server or desktop virtualization. At the same time, this same group has to stick to a budget, so they are looking for the most cost-effective way to deploy SSDs.

Budget constraints typically rule out replacing existing storage with a flash-enabled storage system or an all-flash array -- but not always. Next time we'll look at how an ROI can be developed to justify that investment. In the meantime, let's say you have $50,000 to augment your existing storage with SSD. Here are four possible money-saving implementations that we'll also discuss in my upcoming webinar "SSD on a Budget?"

1. SSD Appliances.

A solid-state appliance typically is an all-flash shared storage device that has limited data services. Instead it's usually focused on delivering performance. This lowers costs, but at the expense of a feature-rich array and the increased complexity of managing another silo of storage.

Virtualized environments such as VMware help resolve these shortcomings. As I wrote in "Preparing Storage For Increased VM Density," with the right tools you can easily identify sluggish VMs and migrate them to a high-performance SSD. Hypervisors like VMware can also provide much of the data services -- thin provisioning, snapshots and replication -- that these appliances lack.