Dell executives at the firm's Dell Storage Forum on Wednesday hinted how solid state drive (SSD) technology could rewrite the rules of enterprise storage, indicating the possible direction future products might take.

Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager for global storage at Dell, said that Flash storage "opens up a whole new realm of possibilities", and described it as the "most exciting technology" that Dell has under development.

While Flash SSDs offer much faster performance than conventional hard drives, they are also much costlier, typically restricting their use to applications where performance is critical.

Enterprise-grade SSDs have been finding their way into datacentres for a while as the top end of the storage hierarchy, either replacing 15,000rpm hard drives at the Tier 1 level, or being used to create hybrid drives with built-in Flash to cache the data.

Now, some vendors are starting to experiment with Flash storage connected to servers through the PCI Express bus, rather than a storage interface such as Sata or Serial-attached SCSI (SaS).

Dell describes this as "Tier 0 or even Tier -1" storage, and said it could potentially deliver a huge boost to the most demanding applications, such as holding transaction logs for a database.

However, the company still sees a place for conventional hard drives lower down in the hierarchy.

"Sata will be around for a long time in my opinion, as people will continue to need low-cost disk drives," said Brett Roscoe, executive director of Dell's PowerVault and Data Management division.

Dell is to launch a 10in Android Honeycomb tablet this summer, as the firm looks to have another crack at the tablet market.

The Dell Streak Pro is yet to be officially announced, but widespread reports suggest that it is imminent and will come with some meaty specifications, including a 1GHz dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and a 1,280x800 resolution display.

The tablet will come with 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of internal storage and connectivity in the form of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Reports suggest that Dell will start shipping the device in June.

V3.co.uk contacted Dell to confirm specifications, pricing and availability, but the firm had not responded at the time of writing.

It will be interesting to see how well a 10in tablet from Dell does in an increasingly competitive market. The firm had moderate success when it launched one of the first hybrid smartphone/tablets in the form of the Dell Streak. But its successor, the Dell Streak 7 has failed to set the world alight since its launch last month.

With high-profile firms such as Samsung and LG set to launch devices, and even Amazon tipped to release a ‘Super Kindle' Android tablet, Dell is likely to have its work cut out.