Sun Aims for SSD Future in Servers

Sun has prepared out more of its plans for using solid-state drives in its servers, which it states will help customers to decrease power charges and advance submission presentation in the data center.

The business is offering SSDs that customers can skid into their storage embayments, and in the future will plans to integrate them onto the server motherboard itself to supply much quicker facts and figures get access to for I/O intensive submissions, said Michael Cornwell, lead technologist of blink recollection at Sun. This could assess a change in how Sun servers are designed going ahead, he said.

The company broadcast Wednesday that it is now offering Intel’s 32GB X25-E Extreme SSD which customers can slide into their servers. charge beginning at US$1,199, the propel will be available in a 2.5-inch module that fits into 14 forms of Sun Fire servers and Sun Storage 7000 schemes.

Longer term the company wants to find SSDs nearer to the server CPUs to hasten up tasks like processing world wide web 2.0 and database applications, Cornwell said. conveying SSDs into the server will cut the bottleneck that happens when today’s powerful, multicore CPUs have to delay for data to be delivered from hard drives, Cornwell said.

Solid-state drives, or SSDs, store facts and figures on blink recollection chips and are appearing as an alternative to hard drives, which shop facts and figures on spinning magnetic platters. SSDs offer much quicker read-and-write capabilities, but are still usually more expensive to purchase. Sun said last year that it would offer SSDs in most of its servers by the middle of 2009.

Ideally, facts and figures centers will use a hybrid of SSDs attached to servers and hard drives in centralized storage schemes, Cornwell said. Hard drives supply better long-term storage for large volumes of facts and figures, but SSDs can be established between the central storage scheme and the CPU to supply fast get get access to to to facts and figures that is currently being processed.

He talked about the possibility of trading servers in the future that have no hard propel and rely solely on SSDs, though he didn’t offer details of that Wednesday. Sun also showed a 24GB SSD module made by Samsung founded on its “open blink module” conceive, which the business hopes will supply the cornerstone for other businesses to construct enterprise-grade SSDs.

Adding SSDs to servers could help slash down on hardware buys, because SSDs can act as both storage and to supplement DRAM in servers, said Henry Baltazar, storage and systems analyst at The 451 Group. If a server comes to its recollection limit, supplementing more SSD modules can decrease the need to purchase a new server, he said.