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Focus On: SSDs and cloud storage

Posted on October 01, 2009

Dave Simpson
Editor-in-chief

If you polled end users, industry analysts and vendors, and asked them what the hottest storage technologies are today and into 2010, I'm sure that solid-state disk (SSD) drives and cloud-based storage would make the Top Five. And those are the topics of two of our feature articles this month.

Jim Handy
Objective Analysis

The SSD vs. HDD debate is, for the most part, over. Neither side "won," but SSDs have clearly earned a place at the table. The next debate may be where to put SSDs. That's what Objective Analysis' Jim Handy addresses in "Where do SSDs fit: Servers or arrays?"

Handy, an independent analyst that specializes in the SSD market, focuses on how flash NAND SSDs are filling the gap between traditional HDDs and super high performance DRAM SSDs. He doesn't advocate one approach over the other, but he does point out the advantages and disadvantages associated with both approaches. Eventually, as SSD prices continue to drop, I think that IT organizations will use SSDs both as direct-attached devices on servers as well as internally in RAID arrays.

In the cloud

Russ Fellows
Editor-in-Chief
As much as I dislike the terminologies, cloud computing and cloud storage are here to stay—both as buzzwords and as viable alternatives to traditional IT operations. It's all part of the general trend toward IT as a Service (ITaaS).

Focusing on issues such as virtualization, manageability, billing and chargeback and, perhaps most importantly, security, the Evaluator Group's Russ Fellows looks at the challenges that need to be addressed before cloud computing and/or cloud storage become mainstream. Check out "How real is cloud computing/storage" on p. 19.

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