Sun adds SSDs to rack & blade servers

March 16, 2009: Sun claims to have taken poll position in the enterprise flash server market with the launch of the next step it its end-to-end flash strategy: the release of solid state drive (SSD) technology in its x64, chip multi-threaded (CMT) Rack and Blade systems.

Sun says that its unique systems design approach to SSD integration, which bridges software, systems and storage, redefines the storage hierarchy and helps achieve up to 65x faster response times, up to eight times better throughput, and up to 38 percent less power consumption than servers with traditional spinning hard disk drives.

As flash technology is rapidly coming down in cost, Sun says that the enterprise Flash market is poised for significant growth in 2009. It adds that this will enable exponentially growing amounts of data to be managed more effectively, and as the first major vendor to announce an end-to-end Flash strategy in early 2008, Sun claims the integrated Flash technology it has deployed in its Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage family, and now also its server portfolio, gives it a distinct edge.

"Sun's innovative x64 and CMT server designs with the Solaris OS push data center efficiency to its limits on performance, scalability and energy requirements," said John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun’s Systems Group. "Sun is leading the charge with the addition of Flash technology to our server platforms that blow the doors off with huge performance increases, greater cost efficiencies and savings in power consumption."

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