Arthur Cole spoke with Rich Vignes, senior manager of market development, Seagate.
Cole: Seagate has moved ahead with SSD development even as it devotes more resources to the Cheetah line of 3.5-inch mechanical drives. How exactly do you see SSDs fitting into a mixed drive environment?
Vignes: We see two primary applications for SSDs. One is as a boot device for blade servers. The primary reason customers are interested in this is power, although this is not necessarily a no-brainer. In hard drives, our products range between 4 and 8 watts, while SSDs are somewhere between a watt or two. But considering all the devices on a server motherboard, the storage device consumes less than 10 percent of the total budget.
The other application is as a very high-performance device that can be used for portions of databases. While it’s still prohibitively expensive to make an entire system out of SSDs, it is reasonable to create some portion of a storage array with SSDs – typically 5 percent, or in heavy environments as much as 10 percent.
