Sun Microsystems has promised to introduce solid state hard drives across
much of its server range.
John Fowler, vice president of the systems group at Sun, said that he expects
to have solid state drives in most of the company's servers, including small
systems and much larger data centre systems.
There is a significant price differential between Flash and platter hard
drives, but Sun believes that this will shrink rapidly. Flash prices are
dropping an average of 60 per cent per year.
Sun will also release a new version of Solaris optimised for Flash drives by
the end of 2008.
No pricing information has been released as yet, but Sun said that the drives
will be offered to leading customers on a 60-day trial basis at first.
Seagate
and
Lenovo
have both bet that SSD technology will be key to the future of computing.
However, analysts warn that the technology will
not
be mature enough for commercial use for another five years and that there
are
already
doubts over its reliability.
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