Flash drives being used to increase speed and reduce energy consumption
Flash memory is starting to be used to decrease latency and energy consumption of storage devices.
Hard drive capacity is increasing and cost per Gb is rapidly decreasing but performance has remained more or less flat over the past 10 years. This has created a real imbalance in the speed of processors vs. access to data from hard drives.
In order to increase hard drive performance enterprises are using costly strategies such as short stroking or over -provisioning hard drives. But flash memory can deliver a more cost-effective and energy efficient solution.
They still won’t replace hard drives, which will be useful for low latency needs where they provide a more cost effective solution. But where speed is required they can provide a tremendous advantage. For example, Sun this week introduced a 2TB flash array that consumes just 300 watts and can increase the speed of applications such as Oracle and mySQL by up to 10.
