The executives at the Sun Microsystems company announced their plan to integrate the solid state disks (SDDs) with their hardware and software offer, also releasing a service meant to help customers understand and use the Flash technology.

 The company also plans to release later this year its own SSDs which will ease application performance and scalability and minimize energy consumption and prices.

John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Sun Microsystems explained that it is only a matter of time before people turn to SSDs. “Flash today not about bulk storage … but it’s about performance,” Fowler said, as quoted by EWeek. “The question for us is going to be adoption rate … because people’s adoption rate of storage is really variable,” he added.

Fowler’s take on the matter is based on the significant advantages brought by the "Solid state" storage systems over the classic spinning-disk drives. The new systems have no moving parts, so they use less energy, last a lot longer and can be accessed much easier, almost a hundred times quicker. He exemplified that for an enterprise with hundreds or thousands of disks, choosing a quickly accessible flash drive that uses 2 watts over a slow less productive spinning hard drive should not be something in need of a council debate.

At this point, the estimated price for Sun’s new drives will be of about $1,000 for 32 gigabytes of storage, which is quite a lot compared to the far larger capacity offered by disk drives at the same price. Fortunately, the costs for flash memory keep dropping on a yearly basis, due to the growing global demand.