News

posted on 01 May 2008 12:35

Sun is experimenting with flash solid state drive (SSD) acceleration of its storage products.

SanDisk CEO Eli Harari has said: "Sun and others are reporting dramatic performance and power gains achieved through incorporating solid state disks in new enterprise server storage architectures."

It has not been public knowledge that Sun is experimenting with flash SSDs as a way of speeding up storage array access for disk I/O-bound applications. Sun typically OEMs other suppliers' drive arrays, such as HDS. The implication here is that these are Sun's own storage array products.

Harari said: "The real significance of this market in this early phase is that what we are seeing now is a lot of design-ins and this is really still in the evangelizing phase and for architectures to be developed that could take advantage of Flash memory. A very, very good example of that is a joint application by Sun Microsystems and Intel, where they showed by combining hard disk drives, fast-spinning hard disk drives that are very power consuming but very fast, combining that with a solid state disk, you could achieve a much higher I/O performance, much lower power, and basically absorb the cost of the -- the higher cost of Flash memory because the pure I/O results are actually superior."

Harari also mentions 'others'. Which system or storage manufacturers are those?

His view of the overall flash SSD market is this: "This market appears to be developing into two significant segments: a large commodity segment in the notebook space where price per megabyte will be key and the enterprise space where premiums could be significant."

Harari was speaking in an earnings call discussing SanDisk's Q1fy08 results.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}