Inside Enterprise IT

When I talk to customers about storage challenges and technologies, it is always interesting to get their thoughts on one of the areas that has gotten a lot of attention over the last couple of years: flash or solid state drives (SSD).

Invariably, this discussion’s first stop is “those things are ridiculously expensive, right?”

Thankfully, the discussion is moving past this initial reaction and looking at SSD as an entirely different beast that should be evaluated, not in a $/GB comparison with spinning hard drives, but in other more meaningful and relevant ways.

This article by Storage Switzerland does a great job calling out the benefits of SSD versus traditional spindle-based hard drives for performance sensitive applications, how you might think differently about comparing the costs of implementing and managing SSDs, and that you may find it makes sense to do it now. 

I also recently saw another article by Bert Latamore on Wikibon that provides additional insight by looking at the lifetime cost of flash versus traditional hard drives. I look forward to seeing more discussions like these that help organizations solve storage challenges by thinking about new, more meaningful ways to compare various technologies in  an “apples-to-apples” way.

Let me be clear, SSD isn’t for everyone yet, but it can make sense for a lot more people than are considering implementing them now – if they were evaluating SSD in a new way. 

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