Are SSDs too expensive?

Recent weeks have seen a deluge of products from solid-state disk (SSD) vendors, such as Tegile, Fusion-IO, and now LSI to name but a few; a significant proportion of new storage launches in the last year or two have been based around SSDs.

Some of this is no doubt opportunism, as the production of spinning disk media was seriously disrupted by floods in Thailand last year, a phenomenon that the disk industry reckons has now disappeared. Much of the SSD-fest though purports to resolve the problem of eking more performance from storage systems.

In your laptop or desktop PC, solid state makes sense simply because of its super-fast performance: you can boot the OS of your choice in 15-30 seconds, for example, and a laptop’s battery life is hugely extended. My ThinkPad now runs happily for four to five hours of continuous use, more if I watch a video or don’t interact with it constantly. And in a tablet or smartphone of course there’s no contest.

The problem is that the stuff is expensive, with a quick scan of retail prices showing a price delta of between 13 to 15 times the price of hard disks, measured purely on a capacity basis.

In the enterprise, though, things aren’t quite as simple as that. The vendors’ arguments in favour of SSDs ignore capacity, as they assume that the real problem is performance, where they can demonstrate that SSDs deliver more value for a given amount of cash than spinning media.

There is truth in this argument, but it’s not as if data growth is slowing down. In fact, when you consider that the next wave of data will come from sensors and what’s generally known as the Internet of things – or machine-to-machine communication – then expect the rate of data growth to increase, as this next data tsunami has barely started.

And conversations with both vendors and end users also show that capacity is not something that can be ignored. If you don’t have or can’t afford additional storage, you might need to do something drastic – like actually manage the stuff, although each time I’ve mooted that, I’m told that it remains more costly to do than technological fixes like thin provisioning and deduplication.

In practice, the vendors are, as so often happens in this industry, way ahead of all but the largest, most well-heeled customers. Most users, I would contend, more concerned with ensuring that they have enough storage to handle projected data growth over the next six months. Offer them high-cost, low capacity storage technology and they’re may well reject it in favour of capacity now.

When I put this point to him, LSI’s EMEA channel sales director Thomas Pavel reckoned that the market needed education. Maybe it does. Or maybe it’s just fighting to keep up with demand.