Sun is adding an end-to-end Flash-based disk product line to its portfolio and expects to deliver products to the market during the second half of 2008. The Flash solid state disks (SSD) will be integrated in storage systems and servers, giving customers three times better performance at one-fifth the energy consumption of traditional spinning disk offerings, Sun says. The SSDs will be optimized for the MySQL database and other applications, and work with the Solaris ZFS, which is the file system for the Solaris Operating System (Soalris OS).

"Flash SSD is the most exciting innovation to happen to system and storage design in over a decade. By mid-2009, it will be in the majority of servers and deliver more capacity than DRAM and far greater overall system performance and energy efficiency," predicts John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun. "This technology will completely change how server and storage infrastructure is designed and deployed in enterprise data centers."

Flash disks are storage devices which use non-volatile memory chips instead of spinning disks to store data, giving them a much higher performance than traditional hard drives but at a higher cost. Sun argues that the price is dropping due to the prevalence of consumer devices that use the chips. "Music players and phones have driven tremendous manufacturing scale for flash," Fowler said during a Boston press conference held June 3rd. He commented that the growing supply of cheap flash memory has helped drop the price between 50 and 70 percent a year. As a result, he says, companies like Samsung and Intel have pioneered chips that are more reliable and easier to produce, Forbes' Andy Greenberg reported. Intel will be supplying chips for Sun's emerging hardware products. Fowler wouldn't elaborate further on any other partner deals.

Flash technology enables customers to immediately increase application performance and save on energy costs compared to traditional Fibre Channel hard drives. It allows for greater system utilization and scalability to help decrease server and storage sprawl.

Fowler commented that Flash SSD in storage systems have no moving parts, use less energy and can be accessed much more quickly than moving disk drives. A spinning hard drive takes 100 times as long as a flash drive to access data and uses 15 watts of energy, compared with a flash drive's 2 watts, he said. "For an enterprise that has hundreds or thousands of disks, that adds up quickly," he pointed out.

Speaking to ChannelWeb's Joseph F. Kovar, Sun Senior Director of Open Storage and Networking Graham Lovell said the company plans to make flash disk an option in its storage arrays by building in technology to take advantage of the benefits of flash disks rather than using them as replacements for spinning disks.

"In 2009, users will see that flash has an alternate role to play, not just for replacing spinning disks," he said. "So there will be new storage protocols. You can't just put flash disks in to do what DRAM does. It's a different technology. And accessing flash disks through the SCSI command set doesn't make sense because of their performance."

Lovell also said that Sun plans to start selling more disk arrays without storage capacity and let customers and their solution providers handle the populating of the arrays with whatever drives they prefer. Although this could impact Sun's sales of hard drives, Lovell told ChannelWeb, "There's synergy in buying components from one manufacturer. If there's a problem, customers know who to call to handle it."

Listen to Lovell explain the company's intent to offer solid state, flash technology storage devices for enterprises in a Sun News Radio interview. Runs 15 minutes.

Joerg Moellenkamp offers his perspective on the impact of flash storage in server systems.

Also check out the featured page on Sun's addition of SSD to its open storage architecture. [...read more...]

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