Specific applications now, everything later (Score 2)

I work for an Australian hosting company and we have deployed the SolidFire all-SSD SAN for our cloud-based hosting (shared, reseller, cloud/virtual server), the major benefits of an all-SSD storage solution speak for themselves: far lower I/O wait time, huge IOPS numbers - in SolidFire's case 250,000+ distributed IOPS in our current configuration. We've recently shifted from the HP SAS-based Lefthand SAN offering up to 15,000 IOPS to the new SolidFire all-SSD SAN and the team behind SolidFire are partly from the Lefthand operation from HP, so there's some good know-how there. The article is quite broad in its content, for big data applications SSD SAN storage is still incredibly more expensive ($/GB) than SATA or SAS based SANs - our SolidFire was a huge investment. Many hosting providers are now switching to all-SSD based servers for the performance benefits, however the drawback is primarily total storage capacity of course. For example a typical VPS node using local storage with 10 x SATA drives can get up to 4TB of usable RAID-protected storage. The numbers for an all-SSD node in RAID configuration would be much lower in capacity and suitable higher in cost. Its important to note that many people view SSDs as desktop only hardware, which is fundamentally incorrect, as there are many units out there that offer write longevity much longer than needed (5-10+ years). For many server based applications (not big-data purposes), SSDs are, and will become the predominant choice among many hosting companies. Not every provider can afford the investment of an enterprise grade SAN, however the speed of development from Intel and Samsung will mean the $/GB will drop steeply and disk sizes will increase exponentially (like what we've with SATA in the past 5 years).