Not officially, of course. It just occurred to me that today I wrote two green-themed storage items for the mothership.

The first one this morning, which shocked me to the "core", was on OCZ's line of "affordable" SSDs. A relative term, but they're the cheapest that I've seen so far. Hopefully other manufacturers will follow suit and start nudging their solid state drives into a blissful downward trajectory.

And up the capacity while you're at it, too. Thanks.

Also today, Pillar updated its NAS/SAN platform, the Axiom. Strictly for IT shops, their gear pools disk storage to bring utilization up using a variety of methods, including QoS (of sorts) like in networking. This means that less is "wasted" as there are fewer arrays to buy and keep powered. As novel as it sounds, your IT guys/gals will want to hear nothing of the sort for mission critical apps.

But Pillar has the tech down pat, they say, and offer some pretty convincing guarantees to back up it. I once spoke to a customer of theirs, a no-nonsense IT veteran, and he was singing its praises. Take it for what its worth.

Pillar's CEO, Mike Workman has an entertaining blog (if you're into storage). In this post, entitled "Smoking the Strong Stuff" he pours a cold bucket of reality on the notion that SSD will kick HDD to the curb by 2010. In short, while it makes sense for consumer applications (notebooks, mobiles) it will take more than 1.5 years before SSDs replace disks cost-effectively. Also fun is his missive on "Green Noise."

Good stuff!