DoSTOR September 2, 2008--Van Gogh's pictures, Mozart's music were not accept by society of that time. Bruno was burned to die in Rome for insisting of heliocentricism. But now, those work of art have already became the object that later generations worship. And heliocentricism has also be proven to be the impersonality truth.

Those wisdom were neglected even animadverted for exceeding the cognition of that time. They just had the rotten luck of being born in the wrong century. So as to SSD. The process of SSD's development is tortuous. SSD was born 30 years ago, after night-blooming cereus, it went to silence.

IBM Make SSD Come Back to People's Sight

SSD (Solid State Sisk), was created by StorageTek(now Sun StorageTek). At that time, the price was so high while the performance was so poor, and the market need didn't grow up. All these factors caused SSD's silence. 

But since IBM used SanDisk SSD in its blade server July 2007, SSD come back to people's sight again. In January 2008, EMC adopted 73GB and 146GB SSD in its high end enterprise-class level Symmetrix DMX-4. Sun joint them by using SSD in its servers and storage in June 2008.

Besides that, many other manufactures set foot in this field, such as Samsung, Transcend, Mtron, Intel, Micron, Seagate, Pliant, Nimbus, Mtron, FalconStor, DataDirect, Dell, Sun, Sandisk, Super Talent, Emulex, TMS and so on. As you can see, so many exploiters reflect SSD market is a growth point of storage market.

But people always say the high price bulwark will hinder its development.

SSD is Expensive, what about other solutions?

ESG analysis Mark Peters noticed that the price of SSD is about $15 per GB in May 2008, 10 to 30 times higher than traditional disk's price.

But only compared the price is meaningless. You should compare the two under the same performance need, such as I/O processing, IOPS, bandwidth, processing losd. Then you will learn that SSD is more economical.

Jerry Martuscelli, Solid Data's director of sales and services, says that, when customers are looking for high-speed data transfer, even traditional storage can be expensive. "We worked with a customer where they were looking at striping together as many as 70 Sun servers to hold 128 Gbytes of cache per server -- it was less expensive to use SSD."

"By 2010, it will be near price parity with high-speed FC drives. ... as it will really drive costs down," EMC CEO Joe Tucci said.

The One Who Dare to "Eat Crab"

IDC predicts, SSD revenue will increase at a 70% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2007–2012 and unit shipments at a slightly faster rate of 76%. It's still not quite clear how much of that is relevant to enterprise-class storage, but one point is clear that companies that use SSD must be rich ones.

As we known, at least one firm have "eat crab" already last year. Atlanta, Ga.-based power firm Southern Company has already deployed SSD technology from Solid Data, which has helped it reduce the amount of time spent running tests by almost 50 percent. As a result, Greg Sewell, the firm's computer systems analyst, disagrees that SSD is prohibitively expensive. "To get the same level of performance from traditional disk would have been much more expensive."

Sound From Analysts

The worldwide solid state drive (SSD) market is for real and generated nearly $400 million in revenues in 2007. SSD revenue will increase at a 70% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2007–2012 and unit shipments at a slightly faster rate of 76%, IDC predicts.

"There will also likely be an opportunity for displacement in high-end server-based storage," Citigroup analyst Paul Mansky writes, estimating the future size of the SSD market. “Inclusive of both host and server-based storage opportunities, we estimate a plausible 70,000 Tbyte SSD market in 2007, growing to roughly 118,000 Tbytes by 2009.

Though the need of SSD from enterprises is increasing, Citigroup predicted the total market for external, direct-attached, and server-based storage, including SSDs, will be more than 5,000 Pbytes by 2009, which makes SSD insignificant.

But who knows what will happen tomorrow? What we know is SSD come back.