Solid-State Storage Will Transform Enterprise IT, HP Says

Solid-state technology will bring about fundamental changes to business technology and transform many parts of enterprise IT, thanks in part to the performance gains it offers, Hewlett-Packard believes. But there are several major challenges that must be overcome before solid-state technology plays a big role in tech products that populate business data centers, HP distinguished technologist Jieming Zhu said in an interview with Byte and Switch.

Several enterprise IT vendors have been jumping on the solid-state bandwagon recently. Companies like EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) , Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: JAVA), Samsung Corp. , Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), Compellent Technologies Inc. , Verari Systems Inc. , IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), NetApp Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP), and others have announced solid-state drives, products with SSDs, or plans to support SSD technology. Intel recently called solid-state drives "the future of storage."

HP agrees with that assessment, Zhu says, noting that research firm IDC predicts that SSDs will achieve a 70 percent compound growth by 2012. That growth will be driven by three factors, he said: performance, reduced energy consumption, and ruggedness.

"Solid-state storage technology offers performance that is 10 times to 30 times better than what is available with conventional drives. They also consume very little power, and they are rugged and can handle shocks better," he says. "Solid-state technology will emerge as tier zero storage."

Zhu is careful to distinguish between current solid-state drives, which he feels have limits, and solid-state technology, which he believes has a long and bright future. SSDs based on NAND flash will run into a wall as they shrink down from 60 nanometers to 50 nm to 40 nm to 30 nm. "Beyond that density you have some issues, and there is a lot of fundamental research going on at HP and other places to understand what limits there are."Solid-state drives are useful now, but still have to overcome two key issues before they are more widely adopted in enterprise storage systems and data centers, Zhu says. The main issue is price. "Hard disk drives cost around 20 cents to 50 cents per gigabyte, while solid-state drives cost $2 to $4 per gigabyte. That is a big inhibitor." The good news, he notes, is IDC projects a 40 to 50 percent price reduction over the next several years.

The second issue is reliability. "Solid-state drives come from the consumer market, where they don't have to worry about endurance issues like businesses do," Zhu says. "The enterprise demands tens of thousands of I/Os. The wear issue is real."

Once those issues are solved, and they will be, he feels, tech builders will have to deal with other core issues. "How does the application or operating system deal with this kind of fundamental change? With solid state, there is no such thing as sequential read-and-write. In the long run, it will become an application and OS issue." Other issues include provisioning solid-state storage, measuring mean-time between failures, and remapping blocks of data. "There will be lots of confusion."

Still, Zhu is excited by the promise of solid-state technology. "It is going to take the whole industry to step up and work on these issues," he says. "And I am encouraged that vendors at every level seem to understand the challenge and are working on this along with industry groups. And down the road we need to look at how to shrink the form factor to bring solid-state technology closer to the CPU to speed-up data applications even more."

None of this means the end of tapes or hard-disk drives, Zhu cautions: "No storage technology ever dies. But the next couple of years will be quite exciting for solid-state adoption, and after that, the next wave of progress will depend on vendors like Oracle and Microsoft changing their software to maximize the benefits of solid-state technology."And after that? "There will be new forms of non-volatile technology that will blur the line between memory and storage."