PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD 
The news this week that Intel is investing $32 million in a start-up solid-state drive (SSD) maker illustrates that analyst predictions around SSDs two years ago are bearing truth.
The hype stage is fading as SSDs are being embraced by IT organizations hoping to speed up storage processes to gain efficiency in managing growing data workloads.
For IT managers and storage administrators, that means it’s time to begin evaluating what was once a too-pricey option for many enterprise storage infrastructures.
Intel is just the latest vendor on the SSD bandwagon. It all kicked off big time back in 2008 when EMC hit the market with its SSD technology, and other vendors slowly began falling in line.
That same year, an IDC report predicted that SSDs were ready to hit the mainstream despite the fact that the high-end disk-based systems boasted price tags in the neighborhood of $4 to $5 per gigabyte, and some other options went as high as $50 to $60 per gigabyte of data.
But analysts were sure prices would continue dropping by nearly 50 percent each year. And that’s exactly what has happened.
Despite the economic recession and tight tech spend, 2009 was a good year for SSDs, with shipments surpassing 11 million units—an increase of 14 percent year over year, says research firm IDC in a January 2010 report. IDC predicts SSD adoption will continue to experience tangible advancements, with shipments expected to achieve a compound annual growth rate of 54 percent between now and 2013.
"Despite lingering uncertainties around the economy, IDC remains positive on the outlook for SSDs and believes the trajectories for shipment and revenue growth are a source of optimism moving forward," Jeff Janukowicz, Research Manager, Hard Disk Drive Components and Solid State Drives at IDC, wrote in the report.
Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT, agrees with IDC’s assessment, though he believes mobile computing adoption won’t take root as fast.
“I think SSDs still remain a ‘luxury’ addition for most laptops and PCs, largely related to their considerably higher cost compared to traditional hard disk drives,” says King. Yet SSD’s characteristics (they speed boot-up, provide heftier performance for some specific applications, and aren’t prone to mechanical glitches) make it a valuable option for some business needs, such as road warriors and mobile workers who want that level of application performance.
“I expect that SSD adoption will benefit significantly from continuing system evolution,” says the analyst, noting that when the MacBook Air debuted in mid-2009, there was one SSD-based option (a 128GB model) that listed for around $1,800.
The four Air models Apple announced several weeks ago all sport SSDs (ranging in size from 64-256GB) in 11 inch to 13 inch systems, and are now priced from $999 to $1,599.
“The new top-end Air sports an SSD twice the size of last year’s, [has] more memory, a faster processor, and costs $200 less than last year’s model—a point that is likely to help consumers forget that they will pay a premium for the SSDs in those systems,” says King.
And, given published reports that Apple is expected to buy about 30 percent of next year’s supply of NAND, that means the company is likely enjoying both impressive discounts (from NAND vendors) and impressive margins from its SSD sales.
It also means more price points to come. That’s welcome news to any IT department these days.
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