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There's More To Enterprise SSDs Than Just Speed: Page 2 of 2

Data from the report, 'Research: State of Storage 2012', finds the vast majority of enterprises currently using or planning to use SSDs are using them for databases (61% of the 166 respondents who noted they are using or evaluating SSDs), followed by usage for improving overall server performance (57%) and automated tiered storage (34%). Other notable reasons included technical applications (29%), reducing power consumption (27%), video/multimedia editing (21%) and other transaction-heavy software (26%).

On the subject of server consolidation, Handy says some companies are taking databases and spreading them out over a number of servers. This practice is known as “sharding” (the art of splitting a big database into a number of smaller sets to allow it to be processed in parallel). An SSD reduces the need to shard. Despite this, some hesitation remains, he says.

“Solid-state is still a new technology, and there’s still an uncertainty as to whether or not it will cause problems down the line from the executives’ perspective,” he adds. “There is a lot of places that haven’t adopted SSDs as there are always concerns about adopting a new technology.”

But that could change if considered from a cost-per-Gigabyte basis. The cost of solid-state is dropping.

“There’s a lot of flash memory coming into the market and that’s driven the cost-per-gigabyte down,” Bagley says. “The flash memories are approaching what the real expensive, high-end Fibre Channel 15,000 RPM drives cost on a cost-per-gigabyte basis.

“Part of that has been driven by the shortages of hard drives because of the flooding in Thailand. These things have come together to kind of make a perfect storm for flash.”

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