Solid move

The X-25E Extreme SATA Solid-State Drive (SSD) is aimed at server, workstation and storage systems. What's more, it's made by Intel.

The reason Intel thinks large businesses will want SSDs in their systems is, to some degree, their performance advantages, but perhaps more importantly that: "By reducing the total infrastructure, cooling and energy costs, SSDs can lower total cost of ownership for enterprise applications by more than five times."

Intel claims that the X25-E "increases server, workstation and storage system performance by 100 times over hard disk drives as measured in Input/Output Per Second (IOPS)," so that's a pretty significant performance advantage too. It wants to be though; the 32GB drive will set you back $695.

"Hard disk drive performance has not kept pace with Moore's Law," said Kirk Skaugen, GM of the Intel Server Platforms group. "Intel's high-performance SSDs unleash the full performance of the latest Intel Xeon processor-based systems while increasing reliability and lowering the total cost of ownership for a broad range of server and storage workloads."

"Solid-state drive technology will change the economics of enterprise data centers," added John Fowler, executive VP of the Systems Group at Sun Microsystems. "SSDs, along with our systems and Solaris ZFS with hybrid storage pools, are important components of the Open Storage initiative."

For a breakdown of the technology involved, we recommend you read the press release and, for more, follow the link to the relevant part of the Intel website.

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