Analyzing the Business
of Enterprise IT Innovation
THE FUTURE OF
SOLID-STATE STORAGE
How NAND Flash Offerings Are Changing the Storage Landscape
The disruptive performance capabilities of solid-state devices are changing the
architecture of enterprise servers and storage, while promising cost savings to IT
end users in the form of reduced power, cooling and space consumption.
4 FINDINGS
Customer and vendor interest in
solid-state storage has risen to
new heights, driven by its potential
to fundamentally change how
enterprises store performance-
sensitive data. PAGE 7
• The high price of solid-state
storage devices and the NAND
flash media within them has so far
kept the technology out of reach
for most enterprise customers.
PAGE 14
• Customers are presented with a
variety of models to deploy solid-
state storage. Server-, storage- and
network-centric options provide
choice, but are also creating
confusion in the market. PAGE 15
• The raw performance of solid-state
storage allows customers to reap
‘green’ benefits such as reduced
power, cooling and datacenter
space expenditures as these
devices reduce the requirement for
conventional hard drives. PAGE 12
IM INFORMATION
MANAGEMENT
5 IMPLICATIONS 1 BOTTOM LINE
• Innovation is taking place in flash • After many years of technological
media, controllers and systems, developments, solid-state
offering startups OEM and M&A storage finally appears to be
opportunities with server and ready for mainstream enterprise
storage vendors. PAGE 23 consumption. Successful server
and storage vendors will develop
• Solid-state storage will
or acquire technologies to ensure
be implemented in hybrid
that solid-state storage is used
configurations with conventional
efficiently. Taking into account
hard drives, where it can
the high cost of NAND flash
accelerate performance. PAGE 12
media, solid-state technology
• The efficiency with which storage is still too expensive to be seen
and servers can utilize solid- as a complete replacement for
state technology will be a real hard drives, which will make it
competitive advantage and will necessary for customers to use
bring attention to storage caching hybrid storage implementations.
and tiering technologies. PAGE 41
• A small group of vendors has led
the charge so far, but competition
will ramp up in 2010 with the
entrance of Seagate and new
players into the market. PAGE 23
• The vast majority of NAND
flash produced is being used by
consumer-oriented vendors, so
enterprise vendors will have to
tackle supply issues. PAGE 24 DECEMEBER 2009
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REPORT SNAPSHOT

TITLE The Future of Solid-State Storage

ANALYSTS Henry Baltazar, Analyst, Storage

Simon Robinson, Research Director, Storage
RELEASE DATE December 2009
LENGTH 46 pages

ABOUT THIS REPORT

Solid-state storage has the potential to become the most disruptive technological advance-
ment in the primary storage market since 1956, when IBM released the first hard-disk
storage system. Although no one will deny that hard-drive and storage-system vendors
have made numerous innovations in their field over the past few decades, the most
tangible improvements that have been made are related to storage capacity. By contrast,
the performance of hard drives as a storage medium has thus far struggled to meet the
performance needs of enterprise applications, whose ever-faster transactional performance
is being driven by multicore processors and high-speed networks. The absence of signif-
icant performance improvements for hard drives is even more apparent when compared
with the fact that commodity processing power and LAN bandwidth has grown at an
exponential rate over the past decade and a half.

This report provides an overview of the potential opportunity and role that solid-state
storage technologies will have in the enterprise storage market, with an emphasis on the
current generation of enterprise flash-drive products. Although the blinding performance
of NAND-flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) has captured the attention of enterprise
customers and vendors, reliability and cost continue to confine solid-state storage adop-
tion to niche markets. In the report, we also highlight the pluses and minuses of current
deployment options and discuss how innovation among both startups and large vendors
could potentially alter the market landscape in the near future.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

SECTION 1: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1

1.1 INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 KEY FINDINGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.3 METHODOLOGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

SECTION 2: WHAT IS SOLID-STATE STORAGE,

AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT? 6
2.1 DEFINITIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.1.1 FLASH-BASED SSDs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.1.2 DRAM-BASED SSDs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.2 WHAT MAKES SOLID-STATE STORAGE RELEVANT? . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.2.1 PERFORMANCE RELATIVE TO HARD DRIVES . . . . . . . . . 10
Figure 1: Random I/O PerformancE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Figure 2: Sequential Throughput Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.2.2 POWER AND COOLING IMPACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.3 WILL SOLID-STATE STORAGE REPLACE CONVENTIONAL HARD DRIVES? 12

SECTION 3: SSD DEPLOYMENT OPTIONS AND CHALLENGES 14

3.1 THE PRICE HURDLE AND COMPLEXITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Figure 3: Solid-State Storage Device Pricing . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3.2 DEPLOYMENT OPTIONS – INSIDE, OUTSIDE OR IN BETWEEN? . . . . . . 15
Figure 4: A Comparison of Solid-State Storage Deployment Options . . . . 16
3.2.1 SERVER-CENTRIC DEPLOYMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3.2.2 ARRAY-CENTRIC DEPLOYMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
3.2.3 NETWORK-RESIDENT DEPLOYMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.2.4 SAN-ATTACHED DEPLOYMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
3.2.5 USE CASES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

SECTION 4: MARKET LANDSCAPE 23

4.1 SOLID-STATE MEDIA SUPPLIERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
4.2 SOLID-STATE DEVICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

THE FUTURE OF SOLID-STATE STORAGE

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 Figure 5: Anatomy of a Solid-State Storage Device . . . . . . . . . . 26
4.2.1 FUSION-IO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
4.2.2 INTEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
4.2.3 PLIANT TECHNOLOGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
4.2.4 SANDFORCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
4.2.5 SEAGATE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
4.2.6 STEC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
4.2.7 TEXAS MEMORY SYSTEMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
4.3 CACHING AND DATA TIERING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
4.3.1 AVERE SYSTEMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
4.3.2 DATARAM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38
4.3.3 STORSPEED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
4.3.4 WHIPTAIL TECHNOLOGIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
4.4 STRATEGIES OF SERVER AND STORAGE VENDORS . . . . . . . . . . 41

SECTION 5: RECOMMENDATIONS, IMPLICATIONS

AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS 43
5.1 RECOMMENDATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
5.1.1 FOR ENTERPRISE END USERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
5.1.2 FOR HARDWARE VENDORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
5.2 THE FUTURE OF SOLID-STATE MEDIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

INDEX OF COMPANIES 47

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 ABOUT THE 451 GROUP
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Analyzing the Business Better perspective from the top in independent tech research
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THE FUTURE OF SOLID-STATE STORAGE

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