Sun's solid state news flash

June 5, 2008: Sun Microsystems has unveiled a new range of solid state disks (SSD) that will launch in the second half of 2008 running the Solaris OS, Solaris ZFS and other open source technologies.

>Sun is already shipping Solaris ZFS software optimised for SSD technologies through the OpenSolaris community and claims to be the first major systems vendor to add an end-to-end Flash-based disk product line.

>The Flash drives deliver 3x better performance at one-fifth the energy consumption of traditional spinning disk offerings.

"Flash SSD is the most exciting innovation to happen to system and storage design in over a decade. By mid-2009, it will be in the majority of servers and deliver more capacity than DRAM and far greater overall system performance and energy efficiency," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

"This technology will completely change how server and storage infrastructure is designed and deployed in enterprise data centres."

While the consumer electronics, mobile phone and keychain storage markets are driving the uptake of Fllash storage, and driving down prices, Sun believes SSD will soon be more attractive than Fibre Channel hard drive technology. Enterprise class Fibre Channel hard disk drives have only exhibited a 40 percent year-over-year price decline in the last decade, while the Flash SSD price per gigabyte continues to fall between 50 to 70 percent annually.

Sun's Flash SSD technologies are optimized for MySQL database and other leading applications. www.sun.com/openstorage

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