Sun pushes SSDs in servers to reduce costs, improve performance

From InfoWorld: Sun has laid out more of its plans for using solid-state drives in its servers, which it says will help customers to reduce energy costs and improve application performance in the datacenter.

The company is offering SSDs that customers can slide into their storage bays, and in the future will plans to integrate them onto the server motherboard itself to provide faster data access for I/O intensive applications, said Michael Cornwell, lead technologist of flash memory at Sun. This could mark a change in how Sun servers are designed going forward, he said.

The company announced Wednesday that it is now offering Intel's 32GB X25-E Extreme SSD which customers can slide into their servers. Priced starting at $1,199, the drive will be available in a 2.5-inch module that fits into 14 models of Sun Fire servers and Sun Storage 7000 systems.

Longer term the company hopes to locate SSDs closer to the server CPUs to speed up tasks like processing Web 2.0 and database applications, Cornwell said. Bringing SSDs into the server will cut the bottleneck that occurs when today's powerful, multicore CPUs have to wait for data to be delivered from hard drives, Cornwell said.

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