Storage represents the last stronghold of mechanical computing in an otherwise digital world. Disk systems - even at the high end where drives are networked using fibre channel connections - are still dependent on the speed a read/write head can move across a magnetic platter.

That means that even as server performance has soared, overall systems performance has been "spindle-bound", dependent on how fast data can be accessed on a disk.

In the last year, however, a shift to fully digital storage has got underway with the arrival of systems incorporating solid state drives (SSDs) that not only promise a quantum leap in I/O response times but a major reduction in the energy they consume.

Greener data

The fast-falling cost of these flash drives is already fuelling take-up at the high-end. Over the past year, prices have dropped by over 70%: SSDs now cost about eight times more than high-end fibre channel drives, down from 40 times at the start of 2008.

"With no moving parts, latency of SSDs is very small," says Marcus Schneider, director storage data protection at Fujitsu. "In an environment with random access to large data packages SSDs perform very well."

SSDs are attractive for another reason: their lower energy profile. Again because they have no moving parts, they use less energy than hard disk drives, producing less heat and therefore requiring less cooling, highlights Schneider.

Data Feed

• Solid state drives are 16 times faster than top-of-the-range disk drives when executing read/write operations on a 3:1 ratio, according to research by Fujitsu, which sells the flash option as part of its ETERNUS enterprise storage range.

• In Fujitsu technology benchmarks, solid state drives consumed 40% less power than top-end 15,000rpm online disk drives.