However, this does not mean that enterprises are engaging in wholesale replacement of hard drives with SSDs. "In todays cost-sensitive environment, enterprises want to complement their existing storage environments -- not rip and replace," Delandy says. This corresponds with what SSD providers like IBM also are seeing. "We think some applications, like flash-DRAM hybrid drives, will never be cheaper than disk," says Clod Berrera, a distinguished engineer and chief technology strategist for IBM's systems and technology group. "Where enterprises will see the benefits are in specific applications where the dollars per IOPS [input/output per second] are less."
For many enterprises, this means identifying transaction-intensive applications that are either mission-critical or high revenue-producing -- to justify the dollar expenditures in SSDs. "We are indeed seeing that approach," says Jon Affeldt, senior director of marketing for BlueArc. "The highest enterprise adoption rates are in enterprises in Internet services, financial services, and entertainment and content distribution industries. These industries have a preponderance of high-performance, revenue-generating applications that require optimal performance storage like SSD."
Enterprises are also applying SSD solutions to extend cache memory, especially if they are looking for dramatic performance improvements in data access. "The benefit of deploying SSDs in cache is that you can have an entire working set of data sitting in cache for rapid access," says Michael Cornwell, lead technologist of flash memory at Sun Microsystems. Sun offers a tiered storage system that allows an enterprise with high performance database requirements to place metadata in cache, while allowing access to lower-demand data in other tiers of storage that are occupied by traditional hard drives.
Nevertheless, SSD vendors still must overcome several obstacles if they hope to sell their gear to enterprises IT managers. The most obvious barrier is price, which remains an uphill fight. Most SSD suppliers, when discussing total cost of ownership, usually include "soft" cost savings -- an argument that continues to pale when compared with the hard-cost fact that hard drives are just cheaper than SSDs on a per MB or per GB basis.
Secondly, SSDs and how they are best applied are still not well understood in enterprises. "There are so many acronyms and diverse technologies to choose from," acknowledges Affeldt. "This makes SSDs seem complicated, and it is forcing enterprises to take the time to perform evaluations of SSDs."
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