Solid state drives (or SSDs) are an emerging storage technology that has been getting increasing press over the last year due to its availability as an option for laptops and, in certain segments, for IT sites. Many claims have been made on behalf of SSDs, including that they are faster and greener and that, as such, they represent the future of disk storage. In this column, I look at how the technology works and why they're not greener nor a widespread alternative to hard disk drives.

Before diving into the topic, it's important to be clear what I am referring to as SSDs, as the term is already in the process of corruption. I am referring to drives made up of flash memory, not the DRAM disk products that have been around for decades for sites that need high-speed disk I/O.

In June and August of last year, I wrote a pair of columns in which I extolled the value of virtualization as a solution to excessive energy consumption. The primary benefit, as I described it, is that virtualization makes it possible to consolidate multiple applications onto a single server. That is, apps that currently run on dedicated systems can be moved en masse to a single server that consumes less power -- generally, far less power -- than that required by the dedicated servers.

This economy derives from two principal factors:

1) Modern servers are much more energy-efficient than their forbears. This is true in absolute terms and relative terms. In fact, in relative terms, such as watts per mips, today's systems are orders of magnitude more efficient.

2)

Until very recently, the need for IT to really include eco-concerns as part of overall strategy did not have universal appeal. Surely, sites located in areas such as southern Manhattan where power distribution is already running at maximum capacity have a grave problem. And likewise sites that need more room but have tight expansion constraints. For them, green has been a key preoccupation for a while.

For most other IT sites, however, the main driver for green has been cost reduction -- and until the last few months, the cost of energy was tolerable even if somewhat higher than budgeted. So, pressure existed to reduce unnecessary consumption, but not place the issue at the center of IT concerns. However, with oil now regularly surpassing $130 per barrel, there is no longer any

The golf expression "It's the rub of the green" means the equivalent of "them's the breaks." It refers to the fact that you're going to have your share of good luck and bad luck when your ball is on the green. Every so often you'll hit a divot or other irregularity -- and sometimes the results will be good, other times not so much. It's the rub of the green. Today, I want to refer to the expression in a rather different sense: when green rubs people and IT the wrong way. The world today is so prone to over-marketing, so accustomed to rapid cycles of surging popularity followed by a precipitous descent into oblivion that, at times it feels like the only sane way to deal with new trends is to tune them out. This applies even to green. Let's not forget that the

As reported in the March 26th issue of GreenerComputing News (you do subscribe, right?), the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) is in the process of formulating a power-consumption benchmark for workstations. SPEC is a vendor-neutral, non-profit organization that designs benchmarks for the computer industry. It also hosts a website, www.spec.org, that presents benchmark results for various platforms. Those results are provided by vendors of hardware and software systems who certify that they ran the benchmarks in accordance with SPEC guidelines. While SPEC cannot and does not vouch for those results, the industry puts real effort into maintaining the integrity of posted results. And because those results often figure

In this column, I have previously examined energy-saving options on processors and hard disks. This time around, I'd like to examine one of the other principal energy sinks on the standard PC: graphics cards. Graphics cards are a confusing area of technology because almost all the attention and press the cards receive is dedicated to the high-end, super-expensive cards favored by gamers and hardware aficionados. Those users live and die by the next release of whiz-bang features and the number of anti-aliased triangles that can be displayed.

But if you're choosing graphics capabilities for a business system, the likelihood that anti-aliased triangles are important to your choice is close to nil. And that means that you'll be able to save energy, because generally, the more

Early this month, I attended the Technical Forum of the Green Grid vendor consortium. The Green Grid is a recently formed group that brings together major businesses to establish useful tools and policies for eco-responsibility in IT shops. Its activities include defining metrics for the IT industry, establishing best practices, and encouraging adoption of both.

The two-day forum was narrowly focused on the quest for useful, usable metrics that measure energy efficiency in data centers. While many members of the technical committee have been working on this problem long before Green Grid existed, I was surprised by how little consensus there was on how to measure energy efficiency and how crude the proposed measures currently are. This observation does not in any way denigrate

It is nearly impossible today buy servers or desktops that do not have processors with multiple cores. The use of several cores has gone from an important innovation to a universal feature in two years' time. (Technically, non-x86 processors had multiple cores before this time frame, but the concept was not mainstream until the x86 vendors -- Intel and AMD -- picked it up.) As a result of this ubiquity, sites that are buying new servers need to begin considering the effect of multiple cores. Before starting in, here's a quick refresher. A core comprises most of what used to be a single processor. When semiconductor vendors wanted to put multiple processors on a single chip, they took the basic processor and trimmed a few features that made no sense to duplicate, and called what was left

In my October column, I discussed green disks for desktop systems, which are very rarely the primary source of power consumption for the system. Often the consumption of these hard drives are dwarfed by other components, such as the power supply, processor, chip sets, and so forth.

Hard drives in the data center, however, are a different matter. Data centers frequently have the so-called "spindle farms," in which thousands of disks are providing data services to a wide array of corporate applications. When so many drives are spinning, small savings are quickly multiplied and substantial savings can be recognized by careful selection of disk hardware.

Enterprise disk storage needs, however, are far more complex than simple rooms full of drives. There are various

Victor Hugo, of Les Misérables fame, once wrote that "nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come." It is certainly appropriate to believe that the time has come for green, as we see the interest in all things eco growing across many sectors of technology both in consumer and commercial applications. However, it's far less clear that the enthusiasm for all things green will or even should lead IT to adoption of all technologies that lower power consumption. Specifically, I am thinking of low-end technologies, such as much of the thin-client world, that see in the green and eco-responsibility a possible rebirth that might finally move them from the margins of technology solutions into the mainstream. I regularly hear from these thin-client companies seeking