Sun Microsystems has announced that it will launch a new high-performance, energy-efficient flash SSD product line sometime in the second half this year. Intel has been boasting its coming drives, and now Sun is doing the same. It’s a bit more unexpected that Sun would launch a Solid State Drive though, even if it does offer ZFS software (Solaris filesystem) optimized for SSDs. Sun’s focus is not so much on the retail market though, but like most of its products, the SSD line-up will be found inside of Sun servers and will be optimized for server usage. Unfortunately, there’s not much information about the future drives from Sun, just that Sun has great faith in flash-based storage.
“Flash SSD is the most exciting innovation to happen to system and storage design in over a decade. By mid-2009, it will be in the majority of servers and deliver more capacity than DRAM and far greater overall system performance and energy efficiency,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc. “This technology will completely change how server and storage infrastructure is designed and deployed in enterprise data centers.”
