I got forwarded two more interesting articles on SSD in the Enterprise from Storage Networking World. The Register article here talks about how all major storage vendors now have a SSD strategy, except for 3par.
What really caught my eye was the following paragraph from the Burton group blog:
"...Here's what the market will really love: a blended system with SSDs for performance and terabyte SATA disks for capacity. To make this work, auto-tiering will be needed under the covers, transparent to users. Ideally, this product would allow policy-based data movement leveraging usage patterns and storage costs. [...] SUN's got some interesting ideas using ZFS...."
In my humble opinion, the writer gets the point completely. The vendor that has the technology to seamlessly integrate SSDs in the data path has a compelling story to tell. As for what exactly those interesting ideas from Sun look like, we shall see. Very soon.
Georg, couldn't agree with you more that the right solution for SSD will seamlessly integrate SSD into an automated tiered storage environment along with conventional disk. That's Compellent's viewpoint exactly, which I think is what Gene Ruth was getting at in his original post over at Burton Group. I also just submitted a comment to Gene clarifying that we'll be automating data movement for SSD along with other disk types we're currently supporting, like FC and SATA.
Posted by Bob Fine, Director of Product Management, Compellent on October 22, 2008 at 12:44 PM PDT #