Wikibon analyst, founder and managing consultant at The 1610 Group, and former CIO Scott Lowe has published the first part of a major study of the enterprise-class flash storage market that includes a detailed comparison of the specific products available from several leading flash vendors. While admittedly incomplete, it provides a great deal of valuable base information of the kind that CIOs need when making short-list decisions for NAND flash storage purchases.

The report, “A CIO primer on solid state storage and the solid state market”, begins with a fairly detailed overview of exactly what solid-state storage, aka NAND Flash, is, and how it compares to disk storage in terms of relative cost and performance. His main point in this section is that while NAND flash is more expensive in terms of cost-per-Gbyte than disk, it is less expensive in cost-per-IOPS and orders of magnitude faster in both read and write operations. This makes it actually less expensive in applications where a limited amount of data gets a lot of read/write operations, and particularly where milliseconds count, essentially Tier 0 to Tier 1 in the storage hierarchy. NAND Flash is also more rugged than disk, making it a better choice for systems that must endure less-than-ideal industrial environments.

NAND Flash is not all benefit, however, and Lowe also discusses its downsides, including its tendency to develop dead spots over time, and what vendors are doing to minimize them. The largest of these, of course, is cost-per-Gbyte, but he points out that that is decreasing over time. And he gives a brief explanation of single-level versus multi-level cell (SLC/MLC) technologies and how they compare.

The heart of the study, and its real value, however, is in the extensive comparative chart of the “speeds and feeds” and costs of a list of specific flash products from 11 leading vendors. Lowe has made this as complete as his research allows but does not pretend that this chart is comprehensive. Over time he promises to expand it both to add more vendors and to fill in blank spots where he does not yet have data, and to rationalize data where needed.

This is an ongoing study, and Lowe invites readers to correct and add to his data. However, it is a valuable comparative particularly for CIOs who are in the market and perhaps confused by the number of different products and trying to determine which they should put on their short list.

As with all Wikibon research, this study is available free-of-charge on the Wikibon site. Interested parties are welcome to become Wikibon community members by registering on the site and to correct and comment on this and other research and to publish their own research and industry announcements.