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Sun To Include SSDs On Server Motherboards

Posted by timothy on from the smaller-canyon-shorter-echo dept.

snydeq writes "Sun has announced plans to integrate solid-state drives onto server motherboards to provide faster data access for I/O intensive applications. For now, the company is offering SSDs that customers can slide into their storage bays, but long term, Sun will locate SSDs closer to the server CPUs to cut the bottleneck that occurs when powerful, multicore CPUs have to wait for data to be delivered from hard drives, according to the company. The move could mark a change in how Sun servers are designed going forward, including the possibility of servers that have no hard drive, relying entirely on SSDs."

2 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. But won't it wear out quickly? by Onaga · · Score: 5, Informative

    No.

    Before anyone complains about ssd wearing out quickly, please read here.

  2. Missing... The... Point! by pla · · Score: 5, Insightful

    long term, Sun will locate SSDs closer to the server CPUs to cut the bottleneck that occurs when powerful, multicore CPUs have to wait for data to be delivered from hard drives

    So close, and yet...

    SSDs allow us to stop thinking about attached "storage" devices, and instead think of them as their originally-intended purpose - Slow memory. For decades, they've run so much slower than the CPU that we can't treat them as a form of memory without paying a huge performance hit (try running XP with 64MB of RAM and a 2GB pagefile on the fastest HDD out there, and experience the suck); but finally, with SSDs, we may soon have the ability to treat them as a system's primary memory, with what we currently consider RAM acting as an L3/L4 cache. Not to say SSDs have come anywhere *near* DRAM for speed, but the no-seek-time-penalty starts putting them in the right ballpark.

    I also don't know that I'd consider building them right on the motherboard a good idea... Much like the same path DRAM took, in the end the limitations (no easy upgradeability) far outweighed the convenience ("just there" as a given).

    But one small step at a time, I guess, so kudos to Sun for taking even a baby-step in the right direction.