Power-saving flash SSDs integrate open source tech

Sun Microsystems Inc. has introduced the Sun solid state disks (SSD) that promise to provide greater application performance, massive scale and value through the integration of the Solaris OS, Solaris ZFS and other open source technologies.

The company has begun shipping Solaris ZFS software optimized for SSD technologies through the OpenSolaris community and is the first major systems vendor to add an end-to-end flash-based disk product line to its portfolio, giving customers 3x better performance at one-fifth the energy consumption of traditional spinning disk offerings.

With the recent explosion of data that needs to be processed efficiently and immediately accessible, companies of all sizes are looking to open source storage solutions that work with general purpose hardware. Flash-based innovation enables these customers to immediately increase application performance and save on energy costs compared to traditional Fibre Channel hard drives. Flash technology will also enable greater system utilization and scalability that will decrease server and storage sprawl in already maxed-out data centers.

"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," said John Fowler, executive VP, systems group, Sun Microsystems. "This technology will completely change how server and storage infrastructure is designed and deployed in enterprise data centers."

Sun is expected to deliver flash-based products to market in 2H 08.