Stories by: Mario Apicella

Solid-state drives (SSDs) have been around for many years. Their high cost, however, has limited their deployment to special environments, such as the military, where their rugged, shock-resilient design, coupled with extremely fast performance, justifies the expense.

Hardware upgrades can be a blast. Slide 2GB more RAM in your machine and everything just works faster and smoother. Updating a laptop or desktop with an SSD (solid-state drive), however, can be tricky and not so rewarding, as I am finding.

For years now, 3.5 inches has been the reigning size of disk drives for enterprise storage arrays. Now, however, smaller, more efficient 2.5-inch SFF (small form factor) drives are proving viable challengers to their larger brethren.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: SFF (small form factor) drives allow you to squeeze more spindles into the same rack space, giving you better performance in the same real estate. As an bonus, using 2.5-inch drives reduces the amount of electricity you use and creates less heat than using their larger cousins, essentially making your storage array less demanding on your wallet and on the electric grid.

The EonStor B12 from Infortrend represents an intriguing proposition: an enterprise-class storage solution in miniature, built on 2.5-inch SAS drives. One look at this small-form-factor vision of the future, and you'll be reconsidering the long-term viability of behemoth arrays.

Most storage solutions are optimized for fast access and frequent updates, a formula that fits the requirements of transactional applications to a tee but isn't necessarily well suited to archiving files that - whether by law, or policy, or practice - either must not or will not be changed.

Now that loose SSDs (solid state drives) are available, you may be wondering how best to take advantage of the technology. Here's a breakdown of where retrofitting current machines with solid state could reap worthwhile rewards.

At 104 kilos, the Brocade DCX Backbone would be on the lighter end of middle linebackers in the NFL, but it's well-built to fill the middle of a storage network. Unveiled in late January, the DCX represents the first deliverable of Brocade's DCF (Data Center Fabric), the company's newly designed architecture that promises a more flexible, easier-to-manage, policy-driven network, one that embraces multiple connectivity protocols and is better able to respond to applications' demands and to support new technologies such as server virtualization.

Getting storage vendors to play together nicely is no easy task. When they do, it is an event worthy of pause -- even if the gathering proves more about self-service than boosting the interoperability of their wares.

I would bet dollars against pennies you didn't miss the EMC buzz about SSDs (solid-state drives) in Symmetrix. The vendor carefully orchestrated the announcement in hopes of capitalizing on the most interesting innovation to its portfolio in a long time.

As you may have heard, Dell and EMC this week trumpeted branded versions of the Clariion AX4 storage solution -- in Dell's case, the AX4-5 -- aimed at SMBs. Developed jointly, the technology differs little, yet market strategy may mean Dell will reap deeper rewards.