Analysis: How soon is now for SSD in the data centre?

There remains some confusion in the industry about SSDs, with vendors and analysts sending mixed messages about how low SSD prices will fall.

Last year, EMC estimated that the cost per gigabyte of enterprise SSDs would be on par with high-performance Fibre Channel HDDs by 2011. This year, it reported a 75 per cent decrease in the prices of its SSD products, attributing the decrease to a lower underlying cost of the technology.

Meanwhile, Samsung Semiconductor's flash marketing manager Brian Beard told cnet in March that "flash on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis will reach price parity with hard disk drives in the next few years."

However, Unsworth claims that due to manufacturing costs, a convergence of HDD and SSD prices will not occur.

Despite the tremendous industry support for SSD, Unsworth noted that Gartner has "only a very short list' of SSD vendors that it would recommend.

He named Intel, Samsung, and EMC partner STEC as trusted brands, along with start-ups Fusion-io and Pliant Technology.

Toshiba, Micron Technology, Sandisk, Seagate and Western Digital were named as brands that will heat up the market in the near future.

"We're going to see a lot more competition -- and also consolidation -- in the coming years," Unsworth told iTnews. "We've got pretty much every storage and server vendor I can think of actively supporting and shipping these products."

Last year, the total SSD market generated US$560 million in vendor revenue, which is more than twice that of 2007, Gartner estimates.

The global economic recession has slowed enterprise SSD adoption. However, all evidence points towards the technology being an inevitable progression for enterprise storage.

"It's difficult for companies to justify spending the upfront cost [during the recession], but again, it's just a little bump in the road at this point,"  Unsworth said.

"You've got a plethora of big, innovative companies focused on this area, and I don't see any other technology that's going to be able to rival that level of investment in the near future."