New Startup Claims Big Savings for its Enterprise SSDs

Posted 09/14/2009 at 5:51am | by Paul Lilly

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Despite the deluge of solid state drives (SSDs) that have inundated the market place this past year, desktop consumers still remain hesitant to adopt the pricey technology when mechanical hard drives offer more storage space for less scratch. But what about on the enterprise side?

Silicon Valley startup Pliant Technology says it can save businesses big bucks with its Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) when combined with traditional HDDs. To prove its point, Pliant points to a typical enterprise application performing 640,000 transactions a minute on an 18-terabyte database. According to Pliant, that would normally require about 1,000 small-capacity disk drives to achieve faster access and higher performance, which would take up 40 rack-mount shelves. All told, the final bill would come to $450,000, plus 16,000 watts to run and cool the setup.

But by combing Pliant's EFDs for "hot" current data with regular hard drives for less frequently accessed data, the company says such a hybrid setup would require just six rack-mount shelves and cut costs in half. In addition, such a setup would only require roughly 2,000 watts.

Image Credit: Pliant