According to estimates from iSuppli, roughly 60 percent of Western Digital's hard drive manufacturing centers in Thailand. Additionally, the country plays host to about 50 percent of Toshiba's production. When Thailand was hit by catastrophic flooding during its monsoon season late in 2011, both companies were forced to stop making drives. Western Digital is the largest hard disk vendor, and Toshiba is the fourth-largest. Moreover, some of the parts makers who supply Seagate, Hitachi, and Samsung were also affected.

As a result, predictions are currently being made that hard drives will be much more difficult to come by in 2012. Whether that turns out to be true or not remains to be seen, of course. But in the more immediate term, there's no question that prices are up significantly. Those higher costs are something to consider as you price out storage servers in a market subject to rapid fluctuation.

Now, we're not suggesting that more expensive disks are going to drive resellers toward SSDs as a direct replacement. Per gigabyte, solid-state storage still costs somewhere around an order of magnitude more. However, Troy Winslow, director of product marketing for SSDs at Intel, says that the shortage does have the industry's attention. "Everyone is talking about and evaluating SSDs because the gap is at its narrowest point, since solid-state pricing continues falling at the same time. More people are looking at SSD as true storage vehicles, rather than focusing solely on their number-one value proposition, which is of course performance."

The narrowing disparity in price between solid-state and magnetic storage, coupled with the widening performance delta favoring SSDs, is naturally leading to evermore innovation. Larger single-drive solutions, add-in cards that facilitate flash-based caching, and bootable SSDs the drop right into a PCI Express slot to circumvent SATA's speed limit are but a few of the highlights that take us into the new year.

SSDs Grow Up

A Proven Track Record. Although Intel’s SSD 320 is a pretty new drive, the controller technology on which it centers is well-established and loaded with reliability-oriented functionality.A big part of what makes SSDs more tenable as storage solutions is larger available capacities. "You're now seeing 300 and 600 GB drives from Intel," Winslow continues. "And surprisingly, those are selling very well. Yeah, they're not our frontrunners, but when you're moving tens of thousands of those a quarter, we can see that at the high-end, enthusiasts are seeing the value of big SSDs."

When we were talking about drives armed with 40, 80, or 120 GB of space, it was a forgone conclusion that you'd need to complement them with a large conventional disk just to accommodate all of the data typically found on a desktop, workstation, or server. At those higher capacities, however, it's possible to fit all of a machine's information on flash.

That's only going to continue as the manufacturing processes used to create NAND cells shrink, enabling denser die and pushing costs down. Just recently, IMFT, a joint venture of Intel and Micron, announced that it had entered mass production of 64 Gb (8 GB) flash at 20 nm. Compared to its previous 25 nm process, the layperson might not think that to be a profound improvement.

However, it's going to have a notable impact on what you pay for flash-based storage. "In shifting from 25 to 20 nm, we're getting up to a 40 percent cost reduction," says Intel's Winslow. The next generation of drives, which should surface in 2012, will present an even lower price per gigabyte figure as a result.

Manufacturing Advantage. Not only does IMFT’s latest development in flash enable higher-capacity SSDs, but it also paves the way for faster drives, since the 128 Gb part is ONFi 3.0-compatible.Additionally, IMFT created the first 128 Gb (16 GB) multi-level cell device and showed off a NAND package consisting of eight such die, adding up to 1 Tb (or 128 GB). Not only does the 128 Gb development promise higher capacities, but it's also expected to facilitate greater speeds, too. Compatibility with the ONFi 3.0 specification translates to 333 MT/s data rates—significantly faster than the ONFi 2.0-based devices available today.

Perhaps the best news for business users is that IMFT was able to adopt smaller lithography without affecting write endurance. When the collaborative team introduced its 25 nm process, we discussed some of the challenges it overcame in miniaturizing geometry with Intel's Winslow. Creating compute-quality NAND certainly didn't sound easy. Almost a year later, though, the drives based on that solid-state memory have proven to be some of the most reliable ever seen. This time around, Intel and Micron implemented an innovative new planar cell structure to break the scaling constraints of standard floating gate cells.

"With this advancement, we're showing that there's a lot of life left in NAND," says Intel's Winslow. "In general, it's just exciting to see that there's not a single Global 2000 company that's not evaluating SSDs in their IT department. Take Intel, for instance. We've deployed more than 90,000 SSDs. Nearly every single employee with a notebook has an SSD. This isn't about performance, though that's a nice side effect. Really, it's a matter of lowering total cost of ownership, and saving our company money. Big enterprises are realizing this; what we need are the small- and medium-sized businesses to recognize it as well. It's all part of that paradigm that SSDs are about storage, performance, and reliability." Clearly, the message is getting through to much of the market. Winslow proudly affirms that Intel alone has shipped more than a million SSDs, and it continues to double sales year over year. Growth is so strong, in fact, that it's estimating the same rate in 2012 and again in 2013.

A Robust Portfolio, Today

A Drive For Everyone. The SSD 320 family is available in 40, 80, 120, 160, 300, and 600 GB capacities. With plenty of drives from which to choose, every capacity need can be addressed.It remains to be seen how high Intel moves the capacity benchmark over the next year. Almost certainly, we'll see even larger drives sporting 20 nm IMFT-based NAND. For most folks, though, the company's largest SSD 320 models offer enough space for even the most demanding data workloads. The fact that Intel sells, 40, 80, 120, 160, 300, and 600 GB models makes it really easy to find the right capacity point for virtually any application. And as we know, a handful of reliability-enhancing features ensure data security unlike any other MLC-based solution. For instance, a spare NAND die acts as backup for bad blocks, automatically stepping in to maintain data integrity. And on-board capacitors keep power flowing for long enough to save information in-flight should the power go out. Intel is so confident in the SSD 320 family's dependability story that it extended warranty coverage on the entire line-up to five years.

Although reliability dominates most discussions of the SSD 320s, Intel uses its proprietary controller hardware to power the family, imparting a performance profile that comes close to saturating a SATA 3Gb/s interface. That's significantly more throughput than a mechanical hard drive can muster in sequential transfers—the kind disks handle best. In random access patterns, the SSD 320 simply walks away, leveraging almost-instantaneous access times and multiple NAND channels to satisfy I/O commands quickly. Hard drives, on the other hand, are forced to seek across physical media.

Of course, now we have SATA 6Gb/s controllers as well, capable of accommodating two times the throughput, and Intel has a drive family designed to push those speeds as well. "Going from SATA 3Gb/s to 6Gb/s wasn't a move that benefited hard drives at all; they can't even push the 250 to 300 MB/s a second to saturate last-generation's interface," says Intel's Winslow. "Only SSDs can exceed 3 Gb/s and come close to the limits of a 6 Gb/s connection, delivering close to 500 MB/s in sequential reads and writes. When you look at the potential of technologies like USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, and PCI Express 3.0, solid-state storage is what'll take advantage of them." That performance leap starts with the SSD 510 series. Though it's only available in 120 and 250 GB capacities, sequential reads and writes of up to 500 and 315 MB/s, respectively, come very close to the limit of what SATA 6Gb/s enables. Enthusiasts, in particular, appreciate benchmark results like those.

Performance To The Extreme

Under The Hood. Because SSDs don’t have any moving parts, they’re mechanically very robust. Great performance and exceptional reliability only serve to strengthen their appeal to SMBs.Evolutionary improvements to the SATA interface have taken us from 150 to 300 and now 600 MB/s of peak storage throughput. That's a seemingly screaming-fast number, which should be plenty for almost any environment. And yet, as we find almost everywhere in computing, the fastest interconnects never manage to address every usage model. There are still plenty of applications able to benefit from even wider pipes.

So, where do you go on a chipset to find more than 600 MB/s of available bandwidth? PCI Express. SSDs that drop into PCI Express slots are becoming increasingly popular, especially with video professionals able to utilize their immense sequential throughput. "We seeing a lot of demand for PCI Express-based SSDs on the enterprise side now, too," says Alex Mei, the chief marketing officer at OCZ Technology. "They're using them as cache devices and end-to-end storage solutions. We're able to do some pretty interesting things with regard to sheer performance, enterprise-level features, or even just raw capacity on a card that we simply can't do in a conventional SATA drive."

Mei echoes many of the same observations as Intel's team. Mainly, an increasing number of large and small businesses are considering a shift to solid-state technology. Some of this is likely due to the situation in Thailand; Mei says he has seen more interest in SAS-based SSDs to replace their mechanical counterparts based on the same interface. More so than on the consumer side, enterprise-class hard drives are still fairly expensive. So, the price delta separating high-end disks from solid-state models started off smaller and continues to shrink. The performance variable is important in this space, too. Servers tend to be hardest on storage, making it a lot easier to argue in favor of an SSD's advantage.

An Innovative Form Factor. The PCI Express-based VeloDrive leverages multiple SSD controllers to push performance and capacity far beyond what a single SATA drive can accommodate.Which customers are going to be most enthusiastic about adopting some of the SAS- and PCI Express-based drives that OCZ sells? "One of the really nice things about SSDs is that storage has been such a bottleneck in just about every high-performance computing application for so long that we see deployment of these drives in an even larger variety of environments than we could have imagined. Everything from professionals installing PCIe cards in workstations for design applications to data centers putting them into compute nodes."

The idea of solid-state technology in a data center is pretty new and innovative. Integrators are creating more granular storage hierarchies by putting PCI Express-based devices in between system memory and the slowest medium. Mei continues, "That's allowing businesses to make a smaller investment, and not have to transition 100 percent to SSDs. But they can leverage some of that speed to accelerate the hottest data—information that needs to be accessed most often—and still benefit from the capacity of traditional hard drives on the back-end. A lot of Web hosting companies are doing that, in addition to the cloud computing and cloud storage providers. They need a lot of capacity, so an all-solid-state arrangement wouldn't be economical. A hybrid model of SSDs and hard drives together lets them get a lot more creative in simplifying and designing their data center."

The Reliability Question

Focus On Reliability. Equipped with Intel’s 25 nm MLC NAND with High Endurance Technology, the SSD 710 family is positioned toward data centers, financial applications, and other enterprise apps.It's natural to gravitate to the massive performance made possible by PCI Express-based SSDs. However, in discussing enterprise-class technology, reliability has to take center stage. Big businesses have a relatively easy time trusting hard drives because they've been around for decades. It's a mature piece of hardware. And while they're ironically one of the most likely components to fail, at least the loss of a drive can be countered with a RAID array, hot spares, and an eventual replacement. Leaning on an add-in card without redundancy no doubt seems out of place.

"Reliability has always been a question for those customers," Mei continues. "When we design the right product for their application, though, they see much better reliability than if they were using traditional hard drives, which are subject to all of the issues associated with mechanical parts. But if someone buys an off-the-shelf SSD and plugs it into their server, it might not be the right solution for their specific workload. And that's why it's so important to us that we engage directly with the customer. If it's a true enterprise application, we really need to design something specific for them. That might require something particular on the hardware, software, or firmware side."

This isn't the way we're accustomed to thinking. It's more natural to assume that one of OCZ's widely available and extensively tested desktop Vertex 3 drives is the right choice for maximizing compatibility and long-term reliability. But when a vendor is able to create a custom product, there's a better chance that it'll perform well and behave predictably. "Here's an example. Let's say a customer is putting solid-state storage into a server and needs a proprietary form factor or a certain degree of endurance. We can build something from the ground-up using the NAND they select, and lock that down for them. Or, there's the option to set different overprovisioning parameters. It's even possible to tweak the firmware to optimize for a particular file size—maybe they want to focus on 4 KB or 8 KB chunks of data. You can extend the life of the drive, or tune it explicitly for performance. By understanding the application, we have all of these different knobs that we can tweak."

Don't underestimate the importance of firmware in defining an SSD's performance and reliability characteristics. OCZ counts access to source code as one of its advantages, allowing more flexibility than many competing vendors. Mei gives the example of a very slim drive it built for an Ultrabook, where OCZ's engineers went into the firmware and optimized for boot performance, yielding a more instant-on experience.

Workstation-Class Storage. Video editing professionals will appreciate the greater-than 1 GB/s sequential performance potential of OCZ’s RevoDrive 3 X2, which drops into a four-lane PCIe slot.Interestingly enough, most of the reliability issues we've seen affect SSDs are firmware-related. OCZ sees these lessening over time. "It's about doing more and more compatibility testing. There are two sides to this. On the enterprise side, it helps to lock everything down. When we're building a custom solution for a customer, we're designing a firmware that fits into a particular platform. It's actually a lot more complicated on the consumer side because we don't know if they're plugging into a legacy system or the latest chipset. You have to build a catch-all. You don't have the opportunity so much to optimize for any particular platform."

The message here is clear: communication is a big part of how OCZ ensures its customers get the right solid-state drive for their application. That raises the question, though: how do resellers engage with a manufacturer like OCZ if they're selling a handful of SSDs a month? The company made it a point to build up a dedicated team internally to support smaller customers with specific needs. "We know that they require something, and we have to be a little more nimble," says OCZ's Mei. "We're willing to do some of the projects for smaller customers. But we've also enabled our distribution base to engage as well. They're highly technical, and they pull up our FAE and PM team as necessary to make sure they're selling the right solution. So, the sale might go through one of our disti partners, but that doesn't mean we won't be involved. We can actually do a special firmware for them and deploy it through distribution."

Moving forward, the company says it's looking to PCI Express-based drives as some of the most exciting. The interface lifts the bandwidth limitations that SATA is already encountering. Plus, every modern motherboard includes the PCIe connectivity needed to accommodate a flash-laden card. The size of an add-in card makes it possible to take capacity to new heights, and creative touches like the equivalent of built-in RAID redefine performance ceilings. You can certainly expect more activity in the PCIe space as the interface gets exploited by more of the storage industry.

Taking Control Of Storage

Loaded With Extras. Adaptec’s 6805Q with maxCache 2.0 gives you the power of a hardware RAID card and SSD-based caching, plus an option to add zero-maintenance cache protectionOf course, there are plenty of other ways to leverage PCI Express to improve a customer's storage infrastructure. One of the most universal is a quality RAID controller, which not only gives you the power of additional performance and/or redundancy via a variety of configuration modes, but also introduces other features you wouldn't have had access to otherwise. SSD-based caching for hard drive arrays is one good example. Smart power management is another. And data protection against power failure is a third.

Adaptec recently updated its Series 6 controller line-up to include a handful of models and technologies that effectively blend solid-state and mechanical storage, maximizing the benefits of both. "One feature that we've seen pick up the most momentum in our latest controller family is called Hybrid RAID," says Jason Pederson, product marketing manager for Adaptec. "We refer to that as an introduction to SSD caching. Available on all of our Series 6 products, the feature lets you create Hybrid RAID 1 or Hybrid RAID 10 arrays, mixing solid-state and mechanical drives. Normally, if a competing controller even supported that arrangement, you'd read and write from both devices, and performance would be gated by the disk. In Hybrid RAID, you're still writing to the pair, keeping data consistent. But when we read, our firmware recognizes the SSD, and we only pull data from the SSD, so you see a nice increase in performance."

In a Hybrid RAID configuration, you reserve part of the hard drive to match the SSD's capacity. That becomes the array (the rest of the hard drive is still usable for additional data, of course) If the SSD fails, redundancy on the disk maintains integrity. A hard drive failure means information still on the SSD is safe, though unprotected data on the other partition is not.

More recently, Adaptec introduced Series 6 cards equipped with its second-generation maxCache technology, which takes the caching concept to another level. The first iteration of this capability surfaced back in 2009. After that, Adaptec was acquired by PMC-Sierra, making it necessary to port code over to new silicon and sync up both companies' development. "It's been a long time coming," says Pederson, "But we're very excited to be launching maxCache 2.0. The market is now much more comfortable with that technology than it was two years ago."

Pederson concedes that not everyone saw a compelling benefit from the company's first effort because it only benefited certain usage models, creating an application-specific profile that shone most brightly in read-heavy workloads that emphasized random accesses. "What we're releasing as maxCache 2.0 adds write caching. Of course, now we're seeing increased demand because the combination of accelerated reads and writes makes caching applicable to more apps."

Optimized For Caching. Combining high-performance solid-state storage and Dataplex caching software, OCZ’s Synapse solution helps speed up conventional storage at an affordable price. The inner workings of maxCache are significantly different from Hybrid RAID. Instead of adding SSDs to the logical device pool alongside mechanical storage, maxCache sees disks as the only logical drives, and the SSD cache is completely separate. This lets you create a large, scalable pool of inexpensive capacity backed by an independent, configurable collection of space on solid-state devices. So, say you have a storage server configured with multiple hard drives broken up into several RAID arrays and attached to a controller like Adaptec's 6805TQ. SSDs connected to the same card can then be shared, allowing each of the separate arrays to utilize caching.

Adaptec first launched its Series 6 in March of 2011, incorporating much of the code found in its previous generation and PMC-Sierra's hardware. "We have made a couple of performance tweaks since then," Pederson reveals. "Now, we're releasing a refresh of the Series 6 with certain optimizations, like performance with SATA drives behind expanders is better. I/O throughput with SSDs in certain workloads is a little better, too." The good news for customers with existing Series 6 cards is that Adaptec's improvements are all firmware-based, allowing resellers to go in with a software update and apply it easily, without touching hardware.

Moving forward, Adaptec has some very ambitious plans to reduce latency, increase I/O throughput, and put out models with higher port counts. But today's Series 6 family already does an exceptional job of addressing SMB storage needs with right-sized configurations, broad support for the most relevant RAID modes, and VAR-friendly extras like maxCache and Zero-Maintenance Cache Protection.

New Opportunities

The integration of solid-state technology into desktop PCs, SMB servers, and enterprise-class appliances is creating brand new markets to which the channel can add value. For as much action as this space saw in 2011, our conversations with key players in the storage market indicate that 2012 will be an even wilder ride. Stay tuned as performance, capacity, and reliability all continue to evolve.