gear
2009
1% to 10% in the past nine months alone.
The company projects a nearly complete
changeover to solid state within the next
two years.
The same tectonic shift is jolting the
enterprise hardware giants. IBM recently
announced the frst hint of its own invention’s demise when it unveiled an SSD-based storage-and-data management
system called Quicksilver. Thanks partly
to the Intel SSD processors inside it, Quicksilver is 20 times faster than the world’s
fastest HDD-based server, uses only 20% of
the foor space of the old technology, and
requires just 55% of the power and cooling.
“I’ve been in the business for 24 years,”
says Mike Desens, vice president of data-center development for IBM, “and I don’t
want to make it seem too grand, but I
really feel solid state is going to be a major
destructive force on the conventional
hard-drive industry.” Of course, HDDs
won’t disappear overnight—there are still
hundreds of millions of them spinning
out there. But according to Gartner
Research, SSD sales are projected to rise at
an eye-opening 136% compounded annual
growth rate through 2012 (versus 8.2% for
HDD). Big HDD companies like Fujitsu
and Hitachi are on notice.
The new energy-sipping SSD technology has “green” benefts, of course, which
are catnip for marketers. But there is a
more basic and immediate advantage to an
SSD-driven machine: Many large companies can no longer expand their data centers because they literally can’t get any
more electricity. “A CIO’s worst nightmare,” Desens says, “is having to go tell
the CEO of his company that he can’t put
in any more data-storage capacity because
he’s out of power. It’s happening everywhere. Airline reservation systems, online
retailers, you name it.”
Larry Kasanoff, the executive producer
of the flm True Lies and now the CEO of
the animation studio Threshold Entertainment, had that very nightmare last summer. Kasanoff estimates that each frame
1
< 1 >
IBm Bladecenter
Hs21 Xm
Starting at $2,149, but
price varies radically by
confguration
out in a midwestern server
farm sits your christmas
present, stored as zeroes
and ones on a silent ibm
bladecenter server. The
new bladecenter runs
solid-state hard drives, not
spinning platters, so it’s up
to 20 times faster and uses
half the power. meaning
that set of steak knives will
arrive in plenty of time to
disappoint you.
< 2 >
asUs Eeepc 1000
$499
Tech wonks heard about
Taiwan-based asus long
before 2007, when it
rolled out its frst eeepc
subnotebook computer.
They knew, for example,
that the company used to
make ipods for apple. but
the new eeepc 1000 is
a revelation. it’s the frst
in the asus line with no
moving parts. what it does
have: a 40-gb, shockproof
ssd; an onboard webcam;
bluetooth; and wireless
connectivity—all packed into
2. 93 pounds. santa, baby!
2
130 Fast company December 2008 / January 2009
