SNIA SSD Initiative Delivers New Resources

At the upcoming Storage Networking World (SNW), being held April 6-9, 2009, in Orlando, Fla., the Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) will release an important new white paper on NAND Flash reliability, offer a full conference track of six solid state storage educational tutorials, and display three different vendor-neutral demonstrations on solid state storage on the exhibition floor. In addition, the Solid State Storage Summit – being held Wednesday, April 8, from 2:10 p.m. – 5:35 p.m. – is the first event of its kind at SNW, designed to educate attendees on the market for solid state storage in both commercial and consumer environments.

The Solid State Storage Summit will feature:

• An overview of the Solid State Storage market by Jeff Janukowicz, Research Manager, Solid State Drives and Hard Drive Components, IDC
• An end user perspective by Eric Ulmer, IT Architect, Navitair
• A 90-minute panel discussion on “Consumer/Prosumer/Enterprise Solid State Storage: What are the requirements? How do they differ?”
• A speed networking session where attendees can ask summit sponsors specific questions

The newly-released SSSI white paper, “NAND Flash
Solid State Storage for the Enterprise – An In-depth Look at Reliability,” is designed to explain this new technology and address how it can be used in enterprise environments, including important considerations around reliability.

In addition, the SNIA Solid State Storage Tutorial Track, which takes place at SNW on Tuesday afternoon and Thursday morning, consists of six SNIA Tutorials by members of the SSSI, covering important topics such as performance, reliability, future technologies (beyond NAND Flash), and the cost of ownership of solid state storage. These in-depth tutorials are in addition to three non-SSSI educational presentations on solid state storage taking place on Monday morning in SNW’s concurrent sessions.

Also at SNW, the SSSI will provide three vendor-neutral demonstrations in booths 101-103. One demo will show an enterprise-class video streaming application using a 320GB PCIe attached solid state storage device, the second demonstrates a combination of virtualization and deduplication for solid state storage, while the third offers an extensive set of testing results showing how Solid State Drives (SSDs) from multiple manufacturers compare to each other and to Hard Disk Drives (HDDs).

“The SSSI has undertaken an ambitious agenda in laying the groundwork for new industry standards, education and outreach, and the group’s notable progress is on display at SNW,” said Phil Mills, Chair of the SSSI. “With its strong and diversified cross-industry participation, the SSSI is rapidly expanding its contributions in the exciting and high-growth solid-state storage arena.”

In the few months since its inception, the SNIA’s SSSI has shown significant progress in the development, education and promotion of standards and solutions based on solid state storage. This unified industry group recently formed two additional Initiative committees, the Consumer SSD Market Development Task Force and the SSS Total Cost of Ownership Committee, as well as a SSS Technical Work Group committee for Performance and Benchmarking, all dedicated to helping further the rapid expansion of this emerging market sector.