Xiotech Sets Sights on Solid State

Could the market for solid-state disk (SSD) products be finally picking up speed? SAN vendor Xiotech clearly thinks so, becoming the latest firm to enter the SSD fray this week. (See Xiotech Supports Drives.)

The vendor unveiled support for Fibre Channel-attached SSD drives on its Magnitude 3D 3000 storage systems, citing significant performance benefits over traditional disk. "The promise of SSD has always been there," explains Rob Peglar, Xiotech's vice president of technology, adding that he foresees a "substantial spike" in the use of solid state.

The idea behind the technology, which has been around for a couple of decades, is that it can speed up the transfer of data for I/O-intensive processes like those in databases, enabling applications to run faster. This, according to Peglar, removes the need for users to deploy more servers and storage for I/O-hungry applications.

SSD products use random access memory (RAM), as opposed to traditional magnetic or optical media, to store and access data. As a result, access speeds are typically much higher than traditional disk: 5 milliseconds for magnetic versus as little as 20 microseconds for solid state. Backers of this approach also promote it as a way to minimize or eliminate server I/O bottlenecks.

But this performance comes at a cost. Peglar admits that the technology is still more expensive than traditional magnetic media, although he argues that, on a per I/O basis, it works out to be less expensive. Typically, adds the exec, magnetic media can handle hundreds of I/Os per second, whereas SSD can cope with tens of thousands.Xiotech, however, which is planning to launch its SSD offering this quarter, would not reveal its pricing, nor would Peglar confirm which SSD vendors he is working with. "We have qualified a particular vendor, and we're in the midst of qualifying another," he says.

Randy Kerns, an independent storage analyst, says that price remains the major hurdle in the path of solid state technology. "If they can get to two times the price of high performance magnetic disk today, then it has got a good chance," he says. "Like anything, it's going to be a slow ramp."

This could, indeed, be a long road. The cost per gigabyte of traditional disk, for example, is typically less than $20, compared to $1,500 per gigabyte, when added to a base system, for solid state technology from vendor Texas Memory Systems.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that SSD was said to occupy only a tiny segment of performance-oriented storage for database applications, carving out a niche in the government and financial sectors. Despite the ongoing cost issues, however, there have been some recent signs that the market is on the rise. (See Solid State Seeks Solid Ground.)

Peglar, at least, believes that this is the case, and says that Xiotech has three beta customers looking at solid state already. "Five or six years ago, the technology was very much bleeding edge," he explains. "But now it's reliable and the price points are such that even our mid-tier customers can look at it without batting an eye."Woody Hutsell, executive vice president of Texas Memory Systems, is also seeing more interest in the technology. "I think that the market has grown dramatically. Through the first half of this year our revenues are basically double last year," he says, explaining that the firm now has several hundred customers in areas such as e-commerce, federal government, finance, and telecom.

Xiotech, of course, is not the only vendor playing in the SSD space. In addition to Texas Memory Systems, BitMicro Networks, M-Systems, and Solid Data Systems are also pushing the technology. (See Texas Memory Intros RamSan-120, BitMicro Debuts Military-Grade Disk, and Solid Data Gets Squishy.) BitMicro, for its part, recently clinched a contract with Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Texas Memory Systems is touting what it describes as the world's largest SSD deployment. (See BitMicro Enhances Hospital Network and Texas Memory Touts Largest SDD Installation.)

A study in late 2004 by analyst firm TheInfoPro ranked SSD at the bottom of Fortune 1000 enterprises' hardware adoption plans. (See Survey: SATA, IP SANs Hot Priorities.) Of the 152 storage decision makers interviewed in the study, less than 10 percent said SSD was in their near-term or long-term plans; roughly 87 percent said it was not in their plans at all.

James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch