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A year ago, Sun co-founder and chief architect Andy Bechtolsheim would still get funny looks at the Sun Executive Briefing Center when he predicted that by the end of 2009 every x86 server would come with some sort of Solid State Disk (SSD) option. Well, as you might guess, it is no wonder that StorageSearch's SSD Buyers Guide has seen a 52% increase in page views in the last 12 months. The math is pretty compelling for SSD vs high performance (15K RPM) disk. SSD, while still 2x the cost, offer 100x the performance at 1/10th the power. So it is not surprise that everyone from the traditional big storage vendors to whitebox PC makers are now chasing the SSD market. The real question, however, is not about raw performance but how your application can take advantage of it.

Of course, traditional storage vendors are touting SSD as performance enhancing add-ons exactly where you would expect them to, on their side of the SAN. Not a week goes by without The Register posting a SSD on SAN article. Not a bad start to using SSDs, but think back to your computer engineering 101 class and memory hierarchy. The farther you get from the CPU, the less impact any speedup will make on your application. So is SSD best used as fast disk (separated from your CPU by a relatively slow SAN or network) or as slow memory (directly connected to your CPU by your system I/O bus)?

Of course, to take advantage of SSD in your memory hierarchy, versus your storage hierarchy, you need your software to be cognizant of it's existence. And we all know how hard it is to change software. But that is exactly where ZFS, the open source file system included in Solaris, comes into play. Unlike traditional file systems, you can add storage to ZFS dynamically while the file system is running. So if your ZFS file system is running a bit slow, you could configure in additional SSD storage without taking down the file system, or the applications using it. Pretty cool. SSD's also promise to accelerate database performance. You could certainly do that today with a lot of careful setup of your database, telling it exactly what tables or indexes to put on your SSD. Of course if you had access to the database source code, like with Sun's open source MySQL database, you could build intelligence about optimizing for SSDs directly into the database.

Needless to say, Sun is looking at a wide range of uses for SSD, and optimizing many of our future hardware and software products to work with SSD. But you don't have to wait. You can download OpenSolaris today and start taking advantage of ZFS and SSDs. Better yet, join OpenStorage Community.