Sun is betting big on the SSD in enterprise environments

Sun has put its weight behind solid state drives (SSDs) and is in the initial stages of planning a business strategy around the emerging technology. Sun executive vice president John Fowler believes the SSD is the future of enterprise computing.

Fowler and other Sun executives told reporters today that Sun would be integrating SSDs into the majority of its hardware and software offerings. Looking back, Sun was on this path before this announcement since it already has a version of its Solaris ZFS software available that is optimized for use with SSDs.

Sun announced that it will offer its own line of SSD drives later this year intended to give users of its hardware and software improved performance, power savings and reliability. Sun will offer 2.5” flash-based drives by the second half of 2008 and 3.5-inch drives will be introduced later. Fowler is quoted by eWeek saying, “Flash today is not about bulk storage … but it’s about performance. The question for us is going to be adoption rate … because people’s adoption rates of storage is really variable.”

According to Fowler, Sun expects the adoption of SSDs in the enterprise environment to begin in earnest this year for customers running high-performance computing environments. Mainstream enterprise will begin adopting SSDs later.

Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff told eWeek, “It’s possible all this will occur. But these things don’t happen overnight, particularly in storage, where enterprises are very conservative.” The risk in Sun putting so much weight behind SSDs according to Haff is that enterprise customers may not buy the products.

Sun isn’t the only major league manufacturer betting big on SSDs for the future of enterprise computing. Intel’s own line of SSD drives were going through in-house testing in April and should be on the market later this year.