The Next Big Thing In Storage: SSDs

With data increasing by leaps and bounds, storage technology has now become more important than ever. Surajit Sen, director, Channels and Alliances, NetApp, talks to Biztech2.com about SSDs (solid state drives) – the next big thing in the storage space.

Keeping in mind the cost factor, where do you see SSD adoption heading? Is the Indian market ready for SSDs?

There is definitely a need for this technology in India. Costs still remain prohibitively expensive though. For example, a 72 GB drive costs around $20,000, which is several times higher than the cost of a normal fibre channel disk drive. Thus, the disparity in prices makes the adoption rate slow. However, there are customers, which can leverage this technology well in their environments. As the economy of scale grows, we will see much wider adoption of solid state drives. The prices are directly proportional to the volume of sales of the disk drives. As the volume grows, prices will fall.

There are certain applications, which demand very high performance. If there is any application, which calls for Random Read Performance, one would see that the customer will start using solid state technology.

Could you please elaborate on NetApp offerings?

We got into a partnership with Texas Instruments as a result of which we are going to front end their array with our V-Series technology, which is available to our customers already. Secondly, there is the PAM (Performance Acceleration Module), which can be fitted into any of our storage systems.

How much time do you see till SSDs become an integral part of IT infrastructure?

SSDs can be looked upon as a long-term trend. In the next 10 years, wide proliferation of this technology would be witnessed. By then, organisations would have done away with fibre channel and SATA completely and replaced the same with SSDs. With any new technology, there are different phases through which buyers evolve. The first phase is dominated by early adopters, who are people looking to solve a certain problem and who do not hesitate to experiment with new technology. The next phase is led by customers, who after seeing the early adopters; decide to go in for a certain technology. SSDs will also move through a similar cycle and reach the peak of their adoption cycle.