Latest migrations show SSD is ready for some datacenters

October 19th, 2009

When we asked the IT pros in the Server Room to name the number one barrier to solid state disk (SSD) adoption in the enterprise, “price” was the near unanimous consensus. SSD storage is still significantly more expensive than rotating magnetic media, but with datacenters becoming ever more constrained by power and cooling considerations, the overall price picture for SSD vs. HDD keeps getting better. Sure, at the level of an individual drive, the cost/GB difference between SSD and HDD is still huge, but at the level of the overall datacenter, with floor space, power, and cooling factored in, the delta now looks a lot smaller.

The latest large datacenter to make the leap to SSD is MySpace, a division of Fox Interactive that has recently been shrinking a lot more than just its server footprint—user base, revenues, and staff come to mind. The struggling social networking site has a mandate to boost efficiency, so it turned to FusionIO, makers of PCIe-based SSDs with insanely high sustained read and write bandwidth numbers to match their stratospheric prices (80GB will set you back around $3,500—and it only gets worse from there).