Costly SSDs Are a Strategic Enterprise Purchase

The price for NAND flash in an SSD (solid-state disk) form factor is about $9 per gigabyte for high-end, single-level cell (SLC) flash and $3 per gigabyte or multilevel cell (MLC) flash. In comparison, a Fibre Channel or SAS drive costs 50 to 60 cents per gigabyte. This Computer World article takes a look at enterprise SSD prices and discusses when and why an enterprise should make the investment.

"Many array manufacturers, such as EMC and Hitachi Data Systems, offer an SSD option, and are able to fill array drive slots with SSDs in 2.5-in or 3.5-in hard drive form factors. Some vendors also offer automated tiering software that migrates the most frequently accessed data to the SSDs, while keeping less critical data on lower-cost hard drives.

"When it comes to PCIe NAND flash cards, like those sold by Fusion-io, Texas Memory Systems, Micron or Virident Systems, which can be used in all-flash arrays or in application servers themselves, prices can go through the roof, but so does performance thanks to the higher speed interconnect and the proximity of the flash storage to the server processors.

"Even so, not everyone 'gets' why flash-based PCIe cards are so expensive. Chris Rima, supervisor of infrastructure systems for the Information Services Department at Tucson Electric Power, a subsidiary of UniSource Energy Corp., paid only half of the retail price for flash cards to accelerate the performance in his company's NetApp 3170 NAS arrays. That means he paid $30,000 for each card."

Read the Full Story at Computer World

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